Complexity Squared

Or maybe even cubed. Forty years ago the world seemed like a much more comprehensible place. An intelligent person could grasp the whole of human knowledge. You would not know everything, but you could at least understand how much knowledge there was, what the major areas of knowledge were, and figure out where to go to find out what you needed to know. Maybe it was just my naivety, but I think the total amount of human knowledge has expanded enormously since then.

Yesterday I was poking around (on the internet, where else?) and I stumbled across some photos by Cedric Delsaux. They are some of the coolest photos I have ever seen. This one in particular caught my eye.

It's a red hot strip of steel being rolled out in a mill in the Ukraine. And then it occured to me that one of causes of the increase in knowledge and the accompanying increase in complexity is that the Iron & Bamboo Curtains have collapsed. When I was a kid, the Soviet Union and Red China were big blank places on the map. All I knew is that they were the enemy, they were full of bad guys, and the Russians were sending rockets into space, same as us. Golly gee, Uncle Samizdat, I can't even remember the last time I heard somebody mention the Bamboo Curtain.

And to think it was the evil Republicans who got those barriers torn down. That criminal Nixon (whom I like because he got us out of Vietnam) opened up China, and that fool Reagan (whom I despise because the idiotic American public elected an actor as President. An actor, for crissakes! Not to mention not nuking Lebanon when we were sorely provoked) got Gorbachav to tear down the Berlin wall.

Tip of the hat to The Disco Vietnam.