Chaos and order

Chaos creates order, whereas order creates chaos. At least if you're a system of pendulums. If you, like me, like to take conclusions into the world of analogy, this is an excellent proof that free markets beat central dirigisme, legalizing it beats the war on drugs, evolution beats "intelligent design" and that Wikipedia will ultimately beat Britannica.

They don't make those anymore

HARP: We used to shoot things into space with a gun!

There was an age when people believed in Big Science and Big Engineering. The future was around the corner, with nuclear powered vacuum cleaners and space habitats as the default housing. Not so anymore. Maybe it's for the better that we have a technological race that is more civilian - small science and small engineering of electrical gadgets and the internet. Space no longer is the modern frontier; cyberspace is the post-modern frontier instead. But when Big and future-oriented becomes small and practical, the mind no longer stretches out the way it used to. Maybe this is the reason why science and engineering is on the decline in our schools: What used to be SEXY, with phallic rockets and superguns and whatnot has now turned into something very practical with just about as much sex appeal as accounting, but with less pay. I don't know, but I am starting to long for the old days when there was a Soviet Union.