Tags
Apollo, CERN, Future, Greeting Cards, Hadron Collider, Humour, Mail, Nasa, Pet Peeves, Post Office, Stationary
Would you like to know how to strike fear in the heart of a postal worker?
Show them a musical greeting card.
You know, the ones that play a hardly recognizable tune the instant that you open it.
Sure, it’s cute for about five seconds…
… Fifteen seconds if you’re easily amused.
However, I’m sure very few people having received a musical greeting card actually listen to their musical interlude for even a whole minute.
Unless, you’re a postal worker.
My co-workers and I have come across them as they play nonstop while still in their pristine and unopened envelopes.
Imagine listening to them while you are trapped in your work area as they continue to play for hours at a time because there is no way to…
…TURN THEM OFF.
At work today, while listening to another instalment of the science podcast series, ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage,’ I learned something about these novelty greeting cards that took me quite by surprise.
A panelist on the show made the following comment:
“The computing power (in one of those musical greeting cards) is MORE than the TOTALITY of ALL the computing power IN THE WORLD fifty years ago.”
Just think about that.
All that computing power, more than NASA had for any of the Apollo space missions, put into a tiny piece of plastic for a greeting card that will be played once, maybe twice, only to be thrown away after a day or so.
Can you imagine?
It’s interesting to think what past, present and a future discoveries hold in store for our next generation.
Maybe, fifty years from now, the food industry will be inserting miniaturized hadron colliders into disposable cardboard cups to keep our coffee from getting cold.
Something to think about.
🙂
