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What Are You Optimistic About?

Posted by Hemos on from the explain-yourself dept.

vix86 writes "Last year's "World Question" from The Edge was "What is your Dangerous Idea?" So to kick off the off the new year: As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us! "

2 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. About penis problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Specifically this one:

    http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/Erection.html

  2. My New Year's Eve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    NO drug can produce a paranoia quite like cocaine can. On pot, you wondered if your mommy & daddy might catch you toking; on acid, you wondered if you'd ever sleep again; but on coke you begin to be convinced that SOMEBODY'S WATCHING YOU, LISTENING TO YOUR EVERY WORD, EVEN PLUGGED INTO YOUR INNER THOUGHTS AND IDEATIONS, ALL THE TIME. Whomever you deem to be Big Brother: your folks, the local police, the Feds, the Narcs, the military/industrial complex, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA, the Rand Corporation, Madison Avenue, Scotland Yard, the KGB, Interpol & Deutschebank-- surely they have tracked you down, the deviant miscreant that you are, using their latest supersonic, high-tech, laser/ultrasound, infrared/ultraviolet espionage/surveillance devices.

    Suddenly, the coke user has no doubt that the TV's inocuous flicker is really filled with a persistent, subliminal meta-stream of thought-impregnating propaganda; one is sure that the TV screen itself secretly doubles as a Jetson-esque camera, with Men In Black analyzing your every eyeblink, monitoring your coked-up masturba-thons in front of porn videos. Everything is a vast conspiracy to EXPOSE YOU, CATCH YOU, NAIL YOU, BUST YOU, pin you down and scrutinize you like a cockroach.

    Yeah. I had a lot of fun this New Year's Eve...