A culture that has gotten fat and lazy, that feels entitled to a certain standard of living and of leisure time, without having to work or pay for it, is a culture destined to fail. The barbarian hordes are on their way…and they won’t warn us of our impending doom on facebook, so we will never see them coming.

I saw a movie last night, “The Tourist” (silly, but then most are nowadays). I enjoyed seeing Paris, Venice…and Angie. But I couldn’t help but be reminded that France has invented high speed trains that are in regular use, and have been for a few decades…powered by an electric grid that is 80% nuclear. Contrast this with our Amtrak trains, who are run by a grid mostly powered by burning coal. They travel at a relative snail’s pace…all the while losing billions each year, subsidized by the taxpayer…adding to the debt. It also saddens me that I can’t even mail a letter or a package, without knowing I am adding to the national debt…all because the people in charge don’t know how to run things without losing money, nor do they care to learn. They can just print more greenbacks, because all that matters is the here and now.

If that is a doubling of “knowledge” every 5 years, then I’ll be a monkey’s uncle…typing away, in a room full of my nephews and nieces on old typewriters, until we come up with a sequel to Hamlet, followed by the screenplay adaptation starring justin bieber, snookie, and tim tebow.

A university professor of engineering that I know, recently said that today’s undergrad students are a lot less sophisticated than the students of just a decade ago. He feels that all they know how to do, is walk around with their noses in their smartphones, texting, playing silly games…endlessly “socially networking”…or rather…gossiping and trying to get ***d. Can you imagine an undergrad in engineering, who thinks a screwdriver is only a drink, and has never seen the actual tool used to tighten and loosen screws? I’m not talking about students in non-technical fields, I’m talking about engineering!

I don’t have a dim view of mankind in general, I just have a realistic view, so don’t be so sorry. I refuse to elevate humanity to some higher plane of consciousness than he actually has. I could even venture to say it’s possible the encyclopedia article from your anecdote, chose to provide vastly less space to an issue relating to Christianity (because of a change in attitudes from one generation of editors to the next)…rather than because mankind’s knowledge had somehow increased that many times fold, between editions.

Even the idea of an encyclopedia has changed now, to one written by anonymous volunteer contributors, sometimes from the proverbial “parents’ basement”.

Knowledge is lost and gained every day, especially historical knowledge. Occasionally it’s even hidden or re-written, usually to promote the political agenda of the historian. Sometimes those in high office do their part to promote such revisionism…and it can even help to spawn a political movement. (The one I have in mind is about 100 years old…)

What you refer to as a “dim view”, is merely my reflection on historical reality. There was a reason for “the dark ages”. There’s no guarantee there won’t be more to come. I merely am stating my opinion, that you are too bold and optimistic in your assumption, that there will be an ever present continuation and progression of: culture, technology, knowledge, the free exchange of ideas…and especially of the free markets necessary for all of the above to exist and expand with minimum impediment (whether at an accelerating rate, or one nearer to a constant.)

When I was a kid, my parents bought a 1958 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I once asked my mother how they figured out when Easter would be, so she took my hand, led me over to the Encyclopedia, we sat down and we found out together. The Britannica article describing how they did it was a little less that a quarter of the page, a little less that half of one column. In my highschool library, about 10 years later, I found a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica looked up the same subject, and the explanation was 4 lines long. There were the same number of volumes in the new edition than there were in the one I had as a child. Man’s knowledge had increased in the intervening 10 years that there were so many more things to write about, that they had to be more concise in the explanations.

This “generalized cliche” has certanly been around for a while, and has often been repeated, but every attempt to quantify knowledge simply keeps validating it.

I’m really sorry that you have such a dim view of mankind in general.

You’re seeing the 8×10 print as a casual working piece, rather than something more formal, mounted in a frame. I kind of thought of 8×10′s as the original “portrait” size, at least since the era of the 4×5 film camera (since they are the same aspect). Perhaps people in the fashion and entertainment world use 8×10′s for work…I was just thinking of them where the “end user” sees them. Portraits of family members, framed…and NOT usually viewed at 12 inches.

So I guess I wasn’t seeing someone hand-holding an 8×10 with their arm fully extended…because I wasn’t speaking about hand-holding them at all. I haven’t seen anyone holding one that way very often, since you asked…at least not since the last time I tried it in the mirror.

Assuming such a generalized cliche is remotely accurate, do you honestly believe man’s “knowledge” will continue to “double” every 5 years, indefinitely? I don’t, nor do I put as much weight into such a platitude as you do. The increased ability to share knowledge, need not always guarantee a perpetual net increase, especially at an accelerating rate. Nothing on earth is forever, and in the end all knowledge is futile. Blind faith in mankind just might shorten your life, rather than lengthen it, or enrich it.

Man has merely given birth to a new life form, which too often is just a novelty and a time waster. Its knowledge and processing power probably double every 1 or 2 years. That won’t continue indefinitely either. How do I know? Because physics are physics. That’s not how it happened in whatever sci fi story said otherwise? Well, I guess time will tell, won’t it?

Man is really more interested in “social networking” and playing games, than he is at increasing his knowledge anyway. How often do you stream movies on your smartphone, and when you do, do you view it at the optimized distance to resolve every last pixel? If not, well then don’t even bother.

We don’t know much more than we did in the 1930′s, regarding the basic design of an SLR. The basic idea hasn’t changed, it’s just been refined a lot. Hence the SLR design and layout, is a more MATURE technology than the small part that is a phase autofocus sensor. This was my point, and I feel like I’m beating a dead horse.

Just because the film has been replaced by something newer, more convenient, and “better”, doesn’t mean the wheel has been re-invented. My other point was that phase autofocus is still in its relative infancy, when we see it in the conext of the time since the SLR, and even cameras in general, have been around. “Infancy” surely need not refer to the age of a human infant…since we don’t really call them infants much after age ONE…Technological development is almost always on a much longer time scale than human life (that seems obvious to me, so I wonder why it isn’t to you?)

Some people don’t even see the SLR design as the end-all, be-all camera anyway. I happen to like it, though.

As for your “25 year” figure…(given your own idea of 1985) you seem to be counting backwards from 2010, rather than 2000 like I was. I think of 2000, or early 2000′s, as the time when digital SLR cameras began their initial stages of displacing film cameras (which I’m pretty sure I hinted at…it was pretty obvious.)

Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed…(to say more is to be sued by a trillionaire…)