I’m still sweating bullets this weekend trying to solve a baffling work-related technical problem, so here’s a new site for you to have a look at: Lists of Note. I’ll start you off with this list of predictions for the year 2000, made in 1949 by Robert Heinlein. You can take it from there.
Heinlein did a pretty good job, I think, as you might expect from a successful guy who made his living by imagining the future. (Not perfect, and way off on a few items, but pretty darn good.) Where he really scored was at the end, where he listed eight items that he thought “we won’t get soon, if ever”:
— Travel through time
— Travel faster than the speed of light
— “Radio” transmission of matter.
— Manlike robots with manlike reactions
— Laboratory creation of life
— Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.
— Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
— Nor a permanent end to war.
Here’s another: advice from Thelonius Monk. A sample:
DISCRIMINATION IS IMPORTANT.
2 Comments
I like “what you don’t play is as important as what you do.” Sonny Rollins got that too. They both knew how to use silence and to make every note count.
Monk gets my vote for Greatest Jazz Pianist Ever, with the possible exception of Duke Ellington. Duke’s aphorism: “if it sounds good, it is good.”
Not to be too critical of Heinlein, but … Big Al predicted the lightspeed limit a half century earlier, so he’s been right for over a century, with no likely breakthrough in sight, so to speak, the recent neutrino kerfuffle notwithstanding.