This is an exciting time to be alive. People are doing things that were once thought to be impossible. Ordinary people are doing things on their own that once required a staff and a budget.
Some problems have long afflicted humans -- such as fatal diseases, wars, famine, and the common cold. I have high hopes that people will start making significant progress in at least partially solving those problems in my lifetime, because (a) the necessary tools have plummeted in cost and are easier than ever to ship around the world, and (b) computer networks and various wiki make it easier for people to learn about the problem, learn about how to use the tools, and learn to design new tools.
In particular, I hope that, instead of giving up on a problem because it sounds more complicated than it really is, CommunityWiki:Plaintalk will allow more people than ever to come to a correct understanding of these problems. And I hope that wiki will allow people to coordinate taking thousands of sequential steps toward a solution, making significant progress ("standing on the shoulders of an immense pile of midgets"), rather than independently starting from scratch and trampling the ground near that starting point, without ever getting significantly closer to even a partial solution ("standing on the feet of giants").
-- David Cary http://carybros.com/
2005-10-29: created the local WikiNode.
2007-03-23: trying to build a distributed wiki.
messages
hello david!
thanks for stopping by. cool! -- HeatherJames
No, we won't stop 'til we get to the 99th floor :) -- MattisManzel
should be all fixed now -- HeatherJames