--- Two Months Later ---

*Dusts off blog*

Did you know?

(Just FYI)


This video tells me a few things. The majority of these things are numbers, phrased as facts. But the main ideas it gets across is not all that surprising (if not already known), least ways not as much as the formentioned numbers.

China is becoming a big world player, soon bigger than the U.S. will be. In case you didn't already know. It seems to be commonplace knowledge right now (Southpark has already parodied it), so the real stiff bit delivered from this video are the facts backing it up. Where as previously, being the arrogant Americans that we are: not paying much mind to the world as a whole and what's going on in it, we had to be told about what China is becoming as a nation, and we had to talk other peoples' words for it. The holding of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing was the first stroke of awareness for most people, but China has been in the position it is now for far longer than most were aware of it.

Irregardless, it is now commonplace knowledge that China is becoming a big world player. And in case you had any doubts, or in case you needed to see for yourself just how China is sizing up, this video presented the appropriate numbers.

In addition, numbers were presented relating to an increasingly sporadic job market. This failed to surprise me as well as a new idea - I hear all the time about layoffs. And when one considers how our "Mexican Problem" comes into play, along with outsourcing, it's no wonder that our job market sucks. Given our economic status, it's not getting much better any time soon. But again, a sharp reality of the situation is well delivered in this video using numbers.

"We are living in exponential times" was another message supported by numbers in this video. As biologists will tell you, populations increase exponentially unless limited by some limiting factor, which we humans have yet to encounter. In the video, a lot of numbers are presented showing how things have increased exponentially, or are increasing exponentially. Well given that over time, our world population has increased exponentially from 1 billion in 1804 to our current standing of 6.7 billion, in a short 200 odd years. We have doubled our population in only 38 years! And the amount of time for a doubling to occur will shorten as time goes on; exponential curves are like that. It stands to reason that our technological milestones, being directly related to us humans, should increase exponentially as well, among other things. To me, this video is simply listing off our accomplishments, and predicting some that I can only look forward to.

Finally, the video closes by telling you how many babies have spawned since you started watching the video: in the U.S., in China, and in India. They then tell you how many songs have been illegally downloaded. This struck me as odd, as far as an ending note goes. It sums up the point about our exponentially increasing technology, similarly to how the note about the babies wraps up the points about China and India, but it does so by introducing a different concept of how our technology is being used - as a posed to the milestones that were presented earlier, showing how technology is being used to better ourselves and accomplish more. It presents the darker reality of technology: our increase will affect the negatives just as much as the positives.

Well isn't that just a wall of text... you deserve a prize for reading it all.