I shall tell you something that I find exciting.
The Philosophical Transactions of the British Royal Society (a periodical) from 1665 on have been scanned and are searchable on JSTOR, an academic database which I can access from home.
Back then scientific inquiry was all about discovering the Philosopher's Stone, which would turn base metal into gold, but the British Royal Society branched out into things like calculus (Newton), optics (Huygens), astronomy, medicine, chemistry, physics, and they created the scientific method and one thing led to another, and here we are, living in a modern world where we can go our entire lives without interacting with an iota of gold except what's in our computers.
Barbarians think gold's pretty, but they also think stuffed heads are decorative.
I think gold is pretty, too, but most of the time it just sits in my jewelry box and I only bring it out when I want to impress barbarians. A lot of it's broken, anyway, gold's soft and I am not really into jewelry.
My dad gave me a Rolex when I graduated from law school but I gave it back and asked him for money to buy a computer instead. I wear a Timex. When that breaks, I will probably get a no-name from the dollar store.
(I would love a strand of Tahitian pearls, though, the dark ones. How much have those gone up since 2001?)
(For that matter, how much money have Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart made since 2001?)(Or the founders of Google?) |
