The Blog of Frank W. Zammetti

Here’s a collection of random thoughts I’ve had over the past few days… this should give you a nice insight into just how wacky the inside of my skull is!

• Cerberus, the multi-headed dog in Greek and Roman mythology, guards the gateway to Hades… why exactly does the entrance to Hades need guarding?!?  Are there THAT many people trying to get in? (I actually did some research here… as it turns out, it’s a common misconeption that Cerberus guards the gateway… in fact, he guards the gates of Hades to prevent those that have crossed the river Styx from ever crossing back over… he’s making sure no one gets OUT, which makes *A LOT* more sense!) – A bit of trivia: the firewall protecting my home network is named Cerberus
• If the United States is ever to be invaded by another country, I hope it’s Ukraine.  Why?  Have you seen their prime minister? http://i35.tinypic.com/2yjzmdk.jpg
• I thought I’d clear this up for anyone who wasn’t sure… Dark Matter n. An invention of cosmologists to explain why the hell their equations don’t work out as they want them to.  To be clear: I’m not at all saying dark matter doesn’t exist… I have no clue whether it does or not. All I’m saying is that the experts don’t have a clue either! All they know for sure is things don’t add up like they expect, and the only explanation they can come up with to explain it is to invent some entity that may or may not exist that makes it all balance out…  Hey, wait a minute… when did scientists get religion?!?
• Speaking of math… I was on the Tower of Terror ride last year at Disney World, and I noticed something… the flash a bunch of images at you throughout the ride meant to scare you… ghosts and such… but, they also flash E=MC^2 three separate times!  Proof that math is, in fact, scary!
• I object to any list that has Battlefield Earth on it as a “top xxx worst movies of all time”, as I see all too often. If ever there was a craptacular campfest that is a blast to watch, that’s it. There’s so much unintentionally funny stuff in it that I find it very enjoyable to watch.  For example… Terl’s (John Travolta) conclusion that humans’ favorite food is rat because that’s what the “escapees” went for right away is in and of itself brilliant because it reminds me of a great joke:  A scientist has a flea. He fires off a gun and the flea jumps. He pulls off one of the flea’s legs and again fires the gun and again the flea jumps. He does this two more times and each time the flea jumps. After removing the fourh leg and firing the gun however, the flea does not jump. He fires the gun a few more times just to be sure.  The scientist then concludes that fleas hear through their legs.  The rat thing is the same sort of joke, and I find it very funny, as is the case with much of that movie. So, worst xxx film of all time? No way, it’s just good in a way that was in no way, shape or form intended!!
• I tell my wife this constantly: if you’re attacked and you get the best of the attacker, DON’T F’ING STOP until there’s no way they can physically come back at you. You don’t necessarily have to kill the person, and legally you’re probably better off not killing them, but I don’t know, cutting off both arms and legs seems pretty safe too.  Ironically, I think it was the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that they tried that and it didn’t work… I might have the wrong movie, but I remember one of the bad guys having a hammer embedded in his brain, and that was only after a bunch of other stuff that would have killed any one of us, and he still got up and came after the hapless victims, so maybe it’s not the perfect strategy in ALL cases
• I was asked it I’d go into space, given all the risks involved… I’ll go a step further: I have a wife and two kids, all of whom I love dearly. But, and I’ve told my wife this: if I was ever beamed aboard the Enterprise and the captain (whichever one it happened to be!) said I could go explore the galaxy with them, I wouldn’t even ask to go back down to Earth to say goodbye to my family, I’d just ask “where’s my station, dude?”. Surprisingly, my wife even understands! Not sure my kids would, but that becomes my wife’s problem
• Cracked.com rules, and here’s why: http://www.cracked.com/article_15816_5-most-horrifying-bugs-in-world.html … I’ve read it numerous times and I still crack up every time!
• The latest episode of UFO Hunters (a show most people who know me would think I love, but surprisingly it’s just OK for me… sometimes) they were talking about the rather sudden jump in UFO sighting in Great Britain over the last two years or so.  Now, it all could be real of course, but… might it just be a coincidence that the new Dr. Who has been really popular over just the last few years?  I didn’t watch the whole episode, so I don’t know if any of the sightings were of a flying Titanic or hundreds of evil flying garbage cans, but I’d be willing to bet they were
• When I was a kid I snuck to watch the movie Alien and it scared me so bad I slept in my parents’ room for a week.  But, I’ll tell you what: vegetables are 10 times scarier it turns out: http://www.framebox.de/creations/3d/salad/
• Anyone who says The Temple of Doom is their favorite Indiana Jones movie should promptly be ignored.  If they say Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is their favorite they should promptly be SHOT!
• I still say Velcro is the long sought-after proof that aliens exist and that we recovered technology from a crashed craft at Roswell… I mean, does anyone actually think us pitiful humans could have invented something this awesome ourselves?!? I think not!!

This was originally posted on 8/17/2008 on my old blog and is reposted now.  I promise though, original content coming soon!

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My son is eight years old. The other day I called him into my home office. I showed him the wallpaper I had just created (wow, I gotta admit, I wasn’t aware of the trick for having a “single” wallpaper span two or three monitors… sweet!). On one monitor I have a beautiful Hubble photo of galaxy M101, a spiral galaxy. On the other monitor I have M104, my personal favorite, the Sombrero galaxy.

I asked him if he knew what he was looking at. “Some stars?”, he said. “No, a galaxy”, I replied. “Oh”, he murmured. “Oh?!? Don’t you get it? That’s BILLIONS of suns!”, I cried. “Uh-huh”, he said.

He wasn’t impressed. Not in the least.

I thought about his reactions not just to those pictures but to many of the cool things I’ve shown him lately, and it occurred to me that there’s a very sad trend there: kids today aren’t impressed by anything it seems. The amazing has become commonplace to them, and very little holds the kind of wonder that many things used to be for me and others my age.

I remember around 10th grade, I found a science magazine in the school library where some scientists from IBM had written out IBM in Xenon atoms! They used what was then a new kind of microscope (a Scanning-Tunneling Microscope if I remember correctly to move INDIVIDUAL ATOMS around. I was blown away.

Well, I found a similar picture for my son. He wasn’t thrilled. He actually said “So what?”. I said “You’re looking at atoms, and someone was able to move them around how they wanted”, to which he replied “Ok.”

OK?!??!?

Now, granted, he’s only 8, so his brain just doesn’t have the frame of reference to truly get some of this stuff. Much of it goes over his head. I understand that. But it’s more than that, and it’s not just him. Every single day he is surrounded by marvels of technology that a mere 50 years ago was just so beyond the scope of what was possible and known to most people. I mean, a little under 50 years ago the first electronic calculator was born. A (relatively) small device that could do mathematics for you? People couldn’t believe it! Now, if your PORTABLE PHONE can’t do differential calculus it’s a piece of junk!

Now we have microSD cards that can store 32Gb of data (maybe more, who can keep up any more?) and it’s no big deal to him. I try to give him a frame of reference by showing him a STACK of old hard drives from maybe 10 years ago… I tell him “All those drives TOGETHER only has about 4Gb of data, so this one tiny little card has 8 times as much space”. He looks at me as if to say: “Dear man… thank you for trying… thank you for caring… but so f***ing what??”

I’ve also tried introducing my son to “old” computers, the C64, Atari, those kinds of machines. He likes some of the games, he’s big into video games, but it’s just not the same as it was for me. These were literally life-altering events for me, getting each of those computers and learning what they could do. Hacking code to all hours of the night, getting the memory map for the thing and figuring out what sequence of POKE statements generated various colors and sounds. All that was amazing to me. To him though, they’re just toys.

Now, I’m not looking for the same kind of paradigm shift in thinking that they were for me, but I wonder what it would take for that sort of thing to occur for him at all? I mean, would a Star Trek-style transporter do it? Would a Bishop-style android do it? He wasn’t even as thrilled with his first plane ride as I thought he’d be, as I was when I finally got to go on a plane at about age 19… I wonder if a trip to the moon would be any big deal to him?

I think it’s so easy to take for granted all the human race has accomplished, not to mention all that nature has to offer. We all do it to some degree I think, but the days of sitting around the ONE black-and-white television in the house and being amazed at what you were seeing are long gone. The days of those electronics kits that let you built a simple radio and that being exciting to a child are long gone. The days of looking up at the night sky and seeing the moon and being just utterly floored by the fact that people have walked on it are long gone. The amazing is now commonplace, and that sense of wonder and amazement that my generation had (hopefully still has!) is gone. I believe my generation may wind up being the last that has the pleasure of that sense of discovery, that sense of amazement at what’s possible, what’s been accomplished and simply what IS or MAY BE (maybe The Neverending Story had it right: maybe The Nothing is taking over).

I don’t know what it will take for this new generation to have those same experiences… I know it’s a heck of a lot more than it took for me, and I don’t see anything like that on the horizon. Generation Y has my sympathies.