Shoot for the stars, land on the Moon...

August 2010

Shoot for the stars, land on the Moon...

Did you have a chance to see the night sky this past 4th of July? It was breathtaking. The moon was in it's last quarter phase. My grandfather always said that this meant that the moon was holding water and it would soon rain. Farmers always seemed to keep track of that kind of thing. My family had gathered for the celebration of my grandfather's birthday and yearly reunion. We had a wonderful time all day simply catching up, remembering things grandmother and grandfather would do, riding 4-wheelers along the paths throughout the property and eating the most delicious BBQ this side of the Mississippi. As soon as the fireflies came out, the younger cousins began setting out the fireworks to cap off the reunion. The stars, however, were my fireworks and it has always been that way for me. I could stare up at those natural sparklers for hours and the evening the 4th was no exception. My second cousin asked me what constellation I was looking at, while my first cousin poked fun by saying I was probably looking for spaceships. I told her that I was just thinking about how over 40 years ago Americans landed on the Moon for the first time in history. My facts were challenged by the first cousin. A bet to see who would clean up all the firecracker paper was made and the two pulled out their iPhones. One went to Google and the other to Wikipedia.

Google, it started as a search engine but boy-o-boy has it multiplied. It's like Google was Gizmo the good Magwai and then it was fed after midnight and gave birth to a bunch of Gremlins including a Stripe. Google is in so many different places in the world, doing so many different kinds of things. Being the number one search engine is only ten percent of the iceberg with Google, just go to their products website. They have developed such applications as Gmail to compete with Hotmail and Yahoo, Docs to compete with the Microsoft Office Suite, Maps, Books, News, Labs, Picasa to compete with Flickr and Photobucket, Google Health, SketchUp to compete with AutoCAD, Google Talk, Translate, YouTube and list continues. Google has made such an impact upon our world in under 20 years that its made its co founder Sergey Brin the 24th richest person in the world with over $17 billion dollars. The scary thing is how Google has spread throughout our biosphere like a new alien retro-virus. Also, its close ties with governmental agencies as revealed by the new "internet kill switch" being proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman and others. Personally, I believe Google's 'Achilles' heel is being too big, but not too big to fail. Once you have typed in what you are searching, the results are blanketed by advertisers, top and right side. The links below in the center of the page are also filled with every example, iteration and variation of your search, some even linked to pornography sites. Google was an information overload, even including Michael Jackson in our quick search about the first moonwalk.

Wikipedia, a combination of Wiki, meaning fast, and encyclopedia is the one stop shop for links to everything relevant to your search. It's worth about half a billion dollars and can be updated by anyone with an internet connection. Wikipedia is truly a diamond in the rough due to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) edit style and community of linkers. Wikipedia gives the users the power to add their ideas and opinions to the mix of links. However, if you are not careful, much like with Google's links, you can find yourself clicking down inside a never-ending rabbit hole of random links. The magic of Wikipedia is how it allows for many of the words throughout its articles to become links, even though they may not be directly pertinent to what you are searching. Never the less, Wikipedia is much more specific, if you can trust the savant that linked and edited the posting. And much like most popular social networking sites, anyone can have a Wikipedia page, from Sarah Palin to Fozzie Bear. Wocka Wocka Wocka. For my cousins' face-off, who knew the most about that summer of '69 trip to the Moon? Or, who had some unknown factoid about Michael Collins, the third astronaut, or the whole Apollo Space Program until 1975? My second cousin. She had coverage with AT&T's 3G network and that meant I was not responsible for the picking up of all the firecracker paper in grandmother's front yard. Now, back to infinity and beyond.