Friends, distressing news! Or wonderful news, depending on your point of view. The United States Mint has discontinued the production of the venerable penny. From this point on, persons wishing to know your thoughts may have to pay the princely sum of one nickel, i.e. five cents. Inflation is a killer, no? Actually, pennies will remain in circulation indefinitely, and, since they've become increasingly useless, possibly we've got more than enough floating around to meet current and future "needs". Be that as it may, it's a sad day when the penny has been rendered obsolete by rising prices. It wasn't so long ago that both the U.S. and Britain minted a "half penny", and you could actually buy stuff with it! Okay, it was a while ago. No half pennies have been made in the USA since 1857, nor in the UK since 1967. Bear in mind that the U.S. version was 1/200 of a dollar, whereas the British version was 1/480 of a pound. What can you buy for 1/480 of a pound? Now, nothing, but, back in the Middle Ages, it could get you a loaf of bread, a pound of cheese, or a dozen eggs. Those were the days, am I right??? Assuming you could dodge the Black Death, you could live high on the hog!
Dr. Waddy from Jack: Just by the way, since I'm reminded of it by references to AI, I recently saw the Star Trek episode which I think was network T.V.'s finest moment: when Spock drove an invading intelligence out of the ship's computer by commanding the computer to compute "Pi". That drove the invader beyond endurance; perhaps such might be an antidote for future A.I. overreach(?). Also, the network actually assumed that the audience knew about Pi. !
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: I remember those halcyon days when three pennies would buy a stamp for a cross continent letter. Aren't pennies made of copper? Is it legal now for those who have horded them for decades to render them? How about poor Uncle Scrooge from Donald Duck's world. He delighted in bathing in showers and pools of multitudinous coins .
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: Medieval life: I'd love to see it , maybe even experience it for awhile but I sure wouldn't want to stay . Ever read Michael Crichton's Timeline? Its fiction but it contains a very plausible account of traveling back to that time and the differences people of our time would immediately notice: complete darkness and deep silence at night for most people, ubiquitous milestones, very "redolent "people in a time when bathing was considered risky, noisome sanitation especially in cities and towns, much shorter people, many very obvious physical deformities (goiters, missing eyes etc.). Most of them lived agricultural lives of unrelenting physical labor.
ReplyDeleteAt least they had consolation of a sort in not being aware of how much better life might be. And for those few who could access and appreciate it they had beautiful art, music , literature and scholarship we still enjoy today and they built lasting monumental architecture. They also gave us hints of government which recognizes the worth of the individual. They gave us capitalism, still the guarantor of prosperity and resultant well being (albeit with incipient reasonable favorable modification in our time).
We live lives FAR better than the most fortunate of those from that time. For some of those who know about history they provide an example of why we should cherish the extraordinary good fortune and comfort we have to live with such abundance and relative security. Its a lesson lost on those who consider anything short of perfection to be both ignorant and reprehensible.
Carl Sagan speculated that had ancient Greek and Roman civilization not been eclipsed, mankind might have been traveling in space by 1000AD. Had this transpired, what unimaginable progress (in its positive, not its radical, sense)might have been our lot by now!?
Dr. Waddy from Jack: I forgot to mention above in the benefits medieval Europe afforded us: the university , the revival of classical civilization which flowered in the Rennaissance and the reign of the Christian church.
ReplyDeleteTheoretically, we can always defeat AI by...turning it off. Alas, I doubt we'll have that level of self-control. It will enfeeble us by giving us what we want!!! Dastardly ruse, that.
ReplyDeleteThree pennies for a first class stamp? Not bad. Then again, from an inflation-adjusted perspective, it appears that the cost has been remarkably stable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates#/media/File:US_Postage_History.svg
I did read Timeline! I was a big Michael Crichton fan. That's a blast from the past, Jack. I will have to revisit some of his books. He was a very talented and insightful fellow.
The Middle Ages gave us the university? So it did! Truly, they were the Dark Ages!!!
Dr. Waddy from Jack: One could argue that the Athenian academy was a protouniversity and that medieval Islam had institutions of advanced thinking and learning dealing with subjects beyond Islamic theology Probably safe to say that the middle ages gave us the Western university. Would that the "disputatio" (the customary form of medieval debate)was a tradition still esconsed in our universities (actually it is, in effect, in creditable legal contest) My ,how the referees of such dialectic would disdain what passes for academic integrity in many of our "university" settings today. Charlie Kirk was skilled at rendering "reductio ad absurdum" (the formal medieval custom of reducing an opponent's argument to absurdity using the opponent's "logic") on frantically emotional far left "reasoning".
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