Curious?

Intellectual curiosity is such an incredible thing. Really, where would we be if people didn't consistently question, then punish, the status quo? The cogs of today's world have become so dependent on our minds serving as the belt that pushes the agenda of discovery forward. Not to be technologically determinist of course, but the world has changed so much over the last five years, ten years, twenty years. I can hardly imagine living without many advancements borne upon the world during my lifetime, far less those my grandparents -- and even parents -- did without.

Which sort of leads me to ask what the greatest invention of modern history really is (discounting fire, the wheel and perhaps even the printing press). An automotive history class I took had put into gear the theory that the automobile altered urban geography, city planning and modern transportation, not to mention business on a grand scale. Welcome to Ford's assembly line processes. All true. Some might argue air travel has opened the world to a previously unheard of degree. No, computers. Really, it has to be. The power a small microchip has to alter a broad range of technologies, to enhance global communication, to accelerate development, change the ways we do business and, in fact, the ways in which we approach the world. Of course, this is not to say that all these changes have been good.

I am surrounded by these sorts of people on a daily basis. People pushing the envelope of discovery. Questioning the status quo -- but backing up their claims, too. I am inspired by seeing a researcher's eye light up in excitement when he or she starts to talk -- often animatedly -- about their work. About the promise of a world with cures, new technologies, new ways of looking at things. About looking at the past in a different manner and the future, in a better way. Passion still exists. And out world is better for it.

Which is, in the end, all the more reason to be fearful that North Korea, led by someone known less for intellectual curiosity than for than intellectual anomalies, has acquired nuclear capabilities. Welcome to one of the downsides.