"Jim Henderson"  wrote in message news:523def0c$1@news.povray.org...

> Indeed.  Douglas Adams had a theory about that:

> "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary
> and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's
> invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting
> and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything
> invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

I agree with the timeline (40 next week), but I have a different 
interpretation. I feel differently about "new" things as my perspective 
increases. I remember being believing in gradeschool that we'd be 
millionaires if we "learned computers." I remember believing in Junior High 
that we'd all be replaced by robots. I remember believing in my early 20s 
that we'd all be working at home by now. I remember feeling that history was 
made up of "before the Internet" and "after the Internet."

... and I hear young people now talking the same way about social networking 
and crowd sourcing. To me, it's the young who feel these things are "against 
the natural order." As a middle-aged person, I see them as very much part of 
the natural order, just more of the same.

I remember asking my 100-year-old great-grandmother, who crossed Texas on a 
covered wagon, what she thought of modern automobiles and flying a spaceship 
to the moon. She shrugged. "People still get up, put on their shoes, and go 
out to work."

-Shay

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