[zima]

Originally Posted by sanket.no.1

Compact Discs

Compact discs read from the inside to the outside edge, the reverse of how a record works.

What's interesting/amazing in that? They had to choose one way or the other. And this way is simply more practical, because it allows easily disks of different sizes. Besides, if it would be written from the outside, you'd marvell yourself how it is identical to vinyl.

Computers


* ENIAC, the first electronic computer, appeared 50 years ago. The original ENIAC was about 80 feet long, weighed 30 tons, had 17,000 tubes. By comparison, a desktop computer today can store a million times more information than an ENIAC, and 50,000 times faster.
* From the smallest microprocessor to the biggest mainframe, the average American depends on over 264 computers per day.

- and was considered small back then.
- I'd like to hear more on how many people he depends, if any...(in more metaphorical sense)

E-Mail

The first e-mail was sent over the Internet in 1972.

You know, there's always time for first "something"...

Mobile (Cellular) Phones

As much as 80% of microwaves from mobile phones are absorbed by your head.

Which means nothing. The fluctuations in temperature are much smaller than normal fluctuations present in the brain. And as for "dangerous" electromagnetic field...sex is theoretically much more dangerous in this regard, due to "interference" from others person brain

Nuclear Power

Nuclear ships are basically steamships and driven by steam turbines. The reactor just develops heat to boil the water.

Not the only way to do it (for example you could generate electrocity directly using gradient of temperatures). It's just most efficient given our technicall capabilities.
Besides...in many designs reactor is not colled by water. Resulting hot coolant from reactor is used for this.

Oil

The amount of oil that is used worldwide in one year is doubling every ten years. If that rate of increase continues and if the world were nothing but oil, all the oil would be used up in 400 years.

Similar thing could be said about any form of energy that humans used in the wake of "next generation".

Radio Waves

Radio waves travel so much faster than sound waves that a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 18,000 km away than in the back of the room in which it originated.

So? I don't think the concept of different speeds is interesting...

Ships & Boats

* The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
* The world's oldest surviving boat is a simple 10 feet long dugout dated to 7400 BC. It was discovered in Pesse Holland in the Netherlands.

- You wouldn't want to know how much fuel Space Shuttle burns at startup...
- Wrong. There could be older ones (and probably are)

Skyscraper

The term skyscraper was first used way back in 1888 to describe an 11-story building.

Laughing from those people is at least...unpolite. Unless of course you'll find OK for people 200 years from now to laugh at us.

Sound
Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.

Somebody wasn't attending physics lessons?

Telephones

There are more than 600 million telephone lines today, yet almost half the world's population has never made a phone call.

There's 10x more poeple than phone lines. I'd say half is not a bad score.

Television

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in 1926 in Soho, London. Ten years later there were only 100 TV sets in the world.

At some point it had to happen...
And besides, this TV from 26 was very different than later things...

Transistors

More than a billion transistors are manufactured... every second.

Well...people think often, wrongly, that they're big (metaphorically), and than marvell at things much bigger...which are in reality also small. If this is interesting/amazing I suspect you'd have a heart attack if I'd give some other numbers...

VCR's
The first VCR, made in 1956, was the size of a piano.

And was considered then to be small.

World Trade Center
The World Trade Center towers were designed to collapse in a pancake-like fashion, instead of simply falling over on their sides. This design feature saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives on Sept. 11, 2001, when they were destroyed by terrorists.

As every other skyscraper


Why I waste time replying? So some could understand that above things are not worth marvelling at, there are more interesting/amazing/important things. But you can't describe them with numbers.