View From the Bushes

My brother turned 21 yesterday. I didn't wish him a happy birthday, mostly because I forgot (when you have six siblings I think they should feel fortunate when you get their name right more than 50% of the time), but I also remember what an angst-ridden time 21 can be. You're well into the time when you're supposed to have decided on your raison d'etre, but instead you're just beginning to dig out from the mistakes of your misspent youth. Regret rather than anticipation seems to be the primary emotion and most of your movement is a flight from the past rather than a climb towards the future. In other words congratulating someone on turning 21 is more cruel than even I care to be.

My dad recently saw a poster that quoted Horace Mann as saying, "Public education is the greatest invention of mankind." My father, a profound libertarian, feels that public education is a great invention in the same sense as nuclear weapons. Something which we were marginally better at than the russians, but which our ultimate goal should be to dismantle. In any event in order to take my brother's mind off this wasteland between youth and maturity he asked him what he thought the greatest invention of all time was. The list the two of them came up with includes plant and animal domestication, fire and the wheel, not to mention law and mathematics it does not include the steam engine, the computer, or the flush toilet three things I would have argued for.

I decided to look around on the internet and found that pepople nominated everything from the chair to the telephone as the greatest invention of all time, but I also found this site on britannica.com with a comprehensive list of all the inventions they considered great along with the year of their invention and the inventor. It's interesting that they don't consider fire an invention at all, they do include the flush toilet and they don't, as far as I can tell include the chair. But perhaps most baffling of all, that bane of men everywhere, that cruelest of all instruments of torture, the necktie made the list.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross