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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Quotes you thought you knew

I assume that everyone has heard the Kennedy quote:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
I assume less readers are familiar with the rest of the quote:
""We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."
I think that the last part is key to the whole quote. When I read that it finally made more sense why he was talking about doing hard things instead of easy things.

We (as the United States, or as Mankind) need to do hard things. We need to be continuously pushing the boundaries of the possible. The idea that hard things organize our society and measure us is powerful. Right now, the best of our energies seems to be going into fixing Iraq. People are losing confidence in the economy and the government (although, I don't think that the economy is bad, nor that the government is owed all of the current criticism).

Let's do something big. Shrink the gap. Go to Mars. Use Space Based Solar Power. Beat cancer. Cure malaria. Cure communism and damning fatcats.

Anything the commenters would like to see accomplished?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gifted and talented students should be given an education commensurate with their abilities, an education designed to stimulate great ideas, an education that will enable them to do the hard things.

Anonymous said...

* feasible multicore
* automatically parallelizing compilers
* Linux Desktop

yajeev said...

to be able to simultaneously determine a particle's position AND momentum.


that, and to determine the precise mechanisms regulating the Snf1 kinase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.


those two, and to be able to read the minds of dogs.

Anonymous said...

Yours are so much more achievable than mine, yajeev.

-- andy