There is something wrong with people. This is by far not the first time I've heard of folks calling 911 over stupid buisness crap. I swear, somewhere in gradeschool or middle school we should have a lesson unit on who you call to report various types of problems.
Okay, I am the first to admit that I really have a hard time making aesthetic determinations about guys, but why the hell would a bunch of people be sending Neil Gaiman an article about how ugly guys are doing better these day... oh. He's mentioned in the article.
*EDIT*
Yeah, I've been spending too much time over at Gender Racial Issues" where none may exist.
*/EDIT*
So, I finished Way of the Wolf 2 before starting In Fury Born.
This is the third time I've checked it out from the library. THe previous two times I just couldn't get past the cover blurb.
This is a science fictionish book. (Well Science Fantasy at least)
It is about alien psychic invader vampires.
Yeah.
Alien Invaders and Vampires. Who can subsist on the "auras" of humans.
But I can get past that point.
I can accept alien invaders and ignore the vampire bits.
Oh they also have uber minions that are more the traditional blood drinking vampires. Also alien, but probably engineered to eat humans.
The brute minions though...
The big strong stupid alien rapist unable to plan for the future brute minions...
Were there any black face shows on the silent screen?
These guys, Glugs or something similar, well it is is pretty easy to draw a fairly strong case that they are stand-ins for the darker side of white America's view of blacks.
This is probably entirely unintentional. In fact, I am not sure that it would be possible to create a big strong stupid servitor race that you couldn't draw the same parallels to.
So, since they are mostly in the background, I can get past that.
Ignoring the above, these are pretty good books. I was going to say pulpish, but if I ignore the above bits they lose some of the pulp aesthetic.
I'm going to give at least the next book a chance. I'll have to see after that. If the vampires get all angsty and stand-in-for-sex-and-deathy then that'll be the end of it for me.
I think I ought to be reading more David Webber.
He makes me want to write.
His newest book? In Fury Born?
Well, it lifts the drop sequence for the drop troops from Starship Troopers, but then so does everyone else who uses drop troops.
Also, it uses all of his favorite military philosophy catch phrases.
You know what the character will do because you can ask "If Honor was a marine, what would she do?"
(It even has, almost verbatium, the scene in either the first or second Honor book near the end where her sponsor almost comes to hate her because of how she reports her casualties with no feeling, seeming to read them off, not coldly but like a grocery list, but then he realizes how much pain she is in and that hiding it is her method of coping.)
There is an in memorandum thread for Jim Baen over at websnark. Very touching. I do wish that Jim weren't dead and that the thread after the article was after some other Snark. The first one needs no explanation. The second one? Well, there are all sorts of discussions hiding in this thread that I'd love to have, but I don't want to be part of moving it away from a discussion of Baen and his life and the good he has done.
(There is a huge Heinlein Discussion in there that won't be had because of that.)
I also wanted to reply to this:
"So too are Baen Books’ titles. David Weber’s books are more about political and social what-ifs than space battles, but work just as well as “space battle” type stories."
Which is a small part of someone's very long "I'll miss Jim Baen" post.
Problem is, at least if he/she is discussing the Honor Harrington books... well, no. They are all about the space battles.
That isn't to say that there isn't a lot of impressive world building, but the question that inspired the setting isn't "what if there was a high tech monarchy on the edge of human space" it is "What do I need to do to justify putting Horratio Hornblower in a space ship?"
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Nice. I'm downloading it right now. I want a generic tool like this though. the .lit format only lets you select one page at a time. Gak. At least with a properly prepared PDF I can select the whole document.
There was a car on fire in front of my house.
Well, between my house and the next one down the street.
I saw it roll past smoking, but I live out in the country, a big cloud of white smoke/dust following a car isn't really noteworthy, even though we have blacktop roads here.
Then someone was running toward my house and I went to get the door and saw a burning car through the window.
About that time the first firefighters showed up in their private vehicles. ONe pulled out a fire extinguisher and gave it a go. The fire didn't even notice. On the otherhand, in the intrem the smoke had turned grey and the plastic bits had started to drip.
Then the engine showed up and they hosed it into submission. (The hood, which had warped shut gave them a moment of trouble, but it is all taken care of now.)
Nobody was hurt, the car on the other hand looks like a writeoff.
What the hell do you do to a new or newish car to make it catch on fire?
My dogs are in their cage so they don't get too excited about all of the strangers walking back and forth out there.
From http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html
A frikken men. (Note that Peter Brians is an English Professor and this is attached to a massive page of proper English usage.)
AND that I fully intend to start using the phrase "Apples and Organs."
Oh and an interesting note about Lion's Share? Frequently a lion will actually get her kill taken away from her by groups of scavengers.
Non-Errors
(Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.)
Split infinitives
For the hyper-critical, “to boldly go where no man has gone before” should be “to go boldly. . . .” It is good to be aware that inserting one or more words between “to” and a verb is not strictly speaking an error, and is often more expressive and graceful than moving the intervening words elsewhere; but so many people are offended by split infinitives that it is better to avoid them except when the alternatives sound strained and awkward.
Ending a sentence with a preposition
A fine example of an artificial “rule” which ignores standard usage. The famous witticism usually attributed to Winston Churchill makes the point well: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” see The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Jack Lynch has some sensible comments on this issue. If you think you know the original version of this saying, click here.
Beginning a sentence with a conjunction
It offends those who wish to confine English usage in a logical straitjacket that writers often begin sentences with “and” or “but.” True, one should be aware that many such sentences would be improved by becoming clauses in compound sentences; but there are many effective and traditional uses for beginning sentences thus. One example is the reply to a previous assertion in a dialogue: “But, my dear Watson, the criminal obviously wore expensive boots or he would not have taken such pains to scrape them clean.” Make it a rule to consider whether your conjunction would repose more naturally within the previous sentence or would lose in useful emphasis by being demoted from its position at the head of a new sentence.
Using “between” for only two, “among” for more
The “-tween” in “between” is clearly linked to the number two; but, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “In all senses, between has, from its earliest appearance, been extended to more than two.” We’re talking about Anglo-Saxon here—early. Pedants have labored to enforce “among” when there are three or more objects under discussion, but largely in vain. Even the pickiest speaker does not naturally say, “A treaty has been negotiated among England, France, and Germany.”
Over vs. more than.
Some people claim that “over” cannot be used to signify “more than,” as in “Over a thousand baton-twirlers marched in the parade.” “Over,” they insist, always refers to something physically higher: say, the blimp hovering over the parade route. This absurd distinction ignores the role metaphor plays in language. If I write 1 on the blackboard and 10 beside it, 10 is still the “higher” number. “Over” has been used in the sense of “more than” for over a thousand years.
Gender vs. sex
Feminists eager to remove references to sexuality from discussions of females and males not involving mating or reproduction revived an older meaning of “gender,” which had come to refer in modern times chiefly to language, as a synonym for “sex” in phrases such as “Our goal is to achieve gender equality.” Americans, always nervous about sex, eagerly embraced this usage, which is now standard. In some scholarly fields, “sex” is now used to label biologically determined aspects of maleness and femaleness (reproduction, etc.) while “gender” refers to their socially determined aspects (behavior, attitudes, etc.); but in ordinary speech this distinction is not always maintained. It is disingenuous to pretend that people who use “gender” in the new senses are making an error, just as it is disingenuous to maintain that “Ms.” means “manuscript” (that’s “MS”). Nevertheless, I must admit I was startled to discover that the tag on my new trousers describes not only their size and color, but their “gender.”
Using “who” for people, “that” for animals and inanimate objects
In fact there are many instances in which the most conservative usage is to refer to a person using “that”: “All the politicians that were at the party later denied even knowing the host” is actually somewhat more traditional than the more popular “politicians who.” An aversion to “that” referring to human beings as somehow diminishing their humanity may be praiseworthily sensitive, but it cannot claim the authority of tradition. In some sentences, “that” is clearly preferable to “who”: “She is the only person I know of that prefers whipped cream on her granola.” In the following example, to exchange “that” for “who” would be absurd: “Who was it that said, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’?”*
*Commonly attributed to Gloria Steinem, but she attributes it to Irina Dunn.
“Since” cannot mean “because.”
“Since” need not always refer to time. Since the 14th century, when it was often spelled “syn,” it has also meant “seeing that” or “because.”
Hopefully
This word has meant “it is to be hoped” for a very long time, and those who insist it can only mean “in a hopeful fashion” display more hopefulness than realism.
Momentarily
“The plane will be landing momentarily” says the flight attendant, and the grumpy grammarian in seat 36B thinks to himself, “So we’re going to touch down for just a moment?” Everyone else thinks, “Just a moment now before we land.” Back in the 1920s when this use of “momentarily” was first spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, one might have been accused of misusing the word; but by now it’s listed without comment as one of the standard definitions in most dictionaries.
Lend vs. loan
“Loan me your hat” was just as correct everywhere as “lend me your ears” until the British made “lend” the preferred verb, relegating “loan” to the thing being lent. However, as in so many cases, Americans kept the older pattern, which in its turn has influenced modern British usage so that those insisting that “loan” can only be a noun are in the minority.
Regime vs. regimen
Some people insist that “regime” should be used only in reference to governments, and that people who say they are following a dietary regime should instead use “regimen”; but “regime” has been a synonym of “regimen” for over a century, and is widely accepted in that sense.
Near miss
It is futile to protest that “near miss” should be “near collision.” This expression is a condensed version of something like “a miss that came very near to being a collision” and is similar to “narrow escape.” Everyone knows what is meant by it and almost everyone uses it. It should be noted that the expression can also be used in the sense of almost succeeding in striking a desired target: “His Cointreau soufflé was a near miss.”
“None” singular vs. plural
Some people insist that since “none” is derived from “no one” it should always be singular: “none of us is having dessert.” However, in standard usage, the word is most often treated as a plural. “None of us are having dessert” will do just fine.
Scan vs. skim
Those who insist that “scan” can never be a synonym of “skim” have lost the battle. It is true that the word originally meant “to scrutinize,” but it has now evolved into one of those unfortunate words with two opposite meanings: to examine closely (now rare) and to glance at quickly (much more common). It would be difficult to say which of these two meanings is more prominent in the computer-related usage, to “scan a document.”
Off of
For most Americans, the natural thing to say is “Climb down off of [pronounced ” offa” ] that horse, Tex, with your hands in the air"; but many U.K. authorities urge that the “of” should be omitted as redundant. Where British English reigns you may want to omit the “of” as superfluous, but common usage in the U.S. has rendered “off of” so standard as to generally pass unnoticed, though some American authorities also discourage it in formal writing. However, “off of” meaning “from” in phrases like “borrow five dollars off of Clarice” is definitely nonstandard.
“Gotten” vs. “got.”
In England, the old past participle “gotten” dropped out of use except in such stock phrases as “ill-gotten” and “gotten up,” but in the U.S. it is still considered interchangeable with “got” as the past participle of “get.”
Till vs. ’til.
Since it looks like an abbreviation for “until,” some people argue that this word should always be spelled “’til” (though not all insist on the apostrophe). However, “till” has regularly occurred as a spelling of this word for over 800 years and it’s actually older than “until.” It is perfectly good English.
Teenage vs. teenaged.
Some people object that the word should be “teenaged,” but unlike the still nonstandard “ice tea” and “stain glass,” “teenage” is almost universally accepted now.
Don’t use “reference” to mean “cite.”
Nouns are often turned into verbs in English, and “reference” in the sense “to provide references or citations” has become so widespread that it’s generally acceptable, though some teachers and editors still object.
Feeling bad
“I feel bad” is standard English, as in “This t-shirt smells bad” (not “badly”). “I feel badly” is an incorrect hyper-correction by people who think they know better than the masses. People who are happy can correctly say they feel good, but if they say they feel well, we know they mean to say they’re healthy.
Unquote vs. endquote
Some people get upset at the common pattern by which speakers frame a quotation by saying “quote . . . unquote,” insisting that the latter word should logically be “endquote”; but illogical as it may be, “unquote” has been used in this way for about a century, and “endquote” is nonstandard.
Persuade vs. convince
Some people like to distinguish between these two words by insisting that you persuade people until you have convinced them; but “persuade” as a synonym for “convince” goes back at least to the 16th century. It can mean both to attempt to convince and to succeed. It is no longer common to say things like “I am persuaded that you are an illiterate fool,” but even this usage is not in itself wrong.
Normalcy vs. normality
The word “normalcy” had been around for more than half a century when President Warren G. Harding was assailed in the newspapers for having used it in a 1921 speech. Some folks are still upset; but in the U.S. “normalcy” is a perfectly normal—if uncommon—synonym for “normality.”
You shouldn’t pronounce the “e” in “not my forte.”
Some people insist that it’s an error to pronounce the word “forte” in the expression “not my forte” as if French-derived “forte” were the same as the Italian musical term for “loud”: “for-tay.” But the original French expression is pas mon fort, which not only has no “e” on the end to pronounce—it has a silent “t” as well. It’s too bad that when we imported this phrase we mangled it so badly, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. If you go around saying what sounds like ”that’s not my fort,” people won’t understand what you mean.
However, those who use the phrase to mean “not to my taste” (“Wagnerian opera is not my forte”) are definitely mistaken. Your forte is what you’re good at, not just stuff you like.
“Preventive” is the adjective, “preventative” the noun.
I must say I like the sound of this distinction, but in fact the two are interchangeable as both nouns and adjective, though many prefer “preventive” as being shorter and simpler. “Preventative” used as an adjective dates back to the 17th century, as does “preventive” as a noun.
People should say a book is titled such-and-such rather than entitled.
No less a writer than Chaucer is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as having used “entitled” in this sense, the very first meaning of the word listed by the OED. It may be a touch pretentious, but it’s not wrong.
People are healthy; vegetables are healthful.
Logic and tradition are on the side of those who make this distinction, but I’m afraid phrases like “part of a healthy breakfast” have become so widespread that they are rarely perceived as erroneous except by the hyper-correct. On a related though slightly different subject, it is interesting to note that in English adjectives connected to sensations in the perceiver of an object or event are often transferred to the object or event itself. In the 19th century it was not uncommon to refer, for instance, to a “grateful shower of rain,” and we still say “a gloomy landscape,” “a cheerful sight” and “a happy coincidence.”
Dinner is done; people are finished.
I pronounce this an antiquated distinction rarely observed in modern speech. Nobody really supposes the speaker is saying he or she has been roasted to a turn. In older usage people said, “I have done” to indicate they had completed an action. “I am done” is not really so very different.
Crops are raised; children are reared.
Old-fashioned writers insist that you raise crops and rear children; but in modern American English children are usually “raised.”
“You’ve got mail” should be “you have mail.”
The “have” contracted in phrases like this is merely an auxiliary verb indicating the present perfect tense, not an expression of possession. It is not a redundancy. Compare: “You’ve sent the mail."
It’s “cut the muster,” not “cut the mustard.”
This etymology seems plausible at first. Its proponents often trace it to the American Civil War. We do have the analogous expression “to pass muster,” which probably first suggested this alternative; but although the origins of “cut the mustard” are somewhat obscure, the latter is definitely the form used in all sorts of writing throughout the twentieth century. Common sense would suggest that a person cutting a muster is not someone being selected as fit, but someone eliminating the unfit. See the alt.usage.english faq explanation of this term.
It’s “carrot on a stick,” not “carrot or stick.”
Authoritative dictionaries agree, the original expression refers to offering to reward a stubborn mule or donkey with a carrot or threatening to beat it with a stick and not to a carrot being dangled from a stick. Further discussion. This and other popular etymologies fit under the heading aptly called by the English “too clever by half."
“Spitting image” should be “spit and image.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earlier form was "spitten image,” which may indeed have evolved from “spit and image.” It’s a crude figure of speech: someone else is enough like you to have been spat out by you, made of the very stuff of your body. In the early 20th century the spelling and pronunciation gradually shifted to the less logical “spitting image,” which is now standard. It’s too late to go back. There is no historical basis for the claim sometimes made that the original expression was “spirit and image.”
“Lion’s share” means all of something, not the larger part of something.
Even though the original meaning of this phrase reflected the idea that the lion can take whatever he wants—typically all of the slaughtered game, leaving nothing for anyone else—in modern usage the meaning has shifted to “the largest share.” This makes great sense if you consider the way hyenas and vultures swarm over the leftovers from a typical lion’s kill.
“Connoisseur” should be spelled “connaisseur.”
When we borrowed this word from the French in the 18th century, it was spelled “connoisseur.” Is it our fault the French later decided to shift the spelling of many OI words to the more phonetically accurate AI? Of those Francophone purists who insist we should follow their example I say, let ’em eat bifteck.
from _eurekalert
A University of Illinois at Chicago study published in the July/August issue of the journal Child Development reveals a link between smoking during pregnancy and very early child behavior problems.
Well DUH
And this goes both for mothers who smoke and mothers who spend time around smokers. Of course smoking hurts fetuses. It hurts toddlers and children and adults too. Even if they aren't the ones smoking.
On the other hand, this is cool, about as cool as the article about electronic eyes that I might not actually have copied to my journal a while ago:
For the first time, a team led by Brown University researchers is publishing detailed clinical trial results that show a tiny new brain sensor allowed a quadriplegic to open a prosthetic hand, control a robotic limb and move a computer cursor -- using thoughts alone. The work, featured on the cover of Nature, offers important insights into the human brain and how to tap its power to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injury and other severe motor impairments.
My copies of Civil War 1 and 2 just came in!
I don't remember if I posted this or just talked about it with a bunch of people, but I finially finished The Moor's Last Sigh. The last third of the book would have been decend had it not been laden with all of the baggage of the first 2/3. It really wanted to be a novella instead of a novel.
Every time that the Boy Scouts of America (or groups associated with them) hit the news, I am reminded of how glad I am I left the organization. Honestly? If you want to be thought of as a decent organization/person, it is time to cut your ties with them. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/15015759.htm
I have told parts of this story before. There's new bits here.
Okay, the internet is a really small place.
I've mentioned nodal points before, unusual conincidences that have sent feelers into my future.
My example of this is usually Jenn and Scott.
I'm a Heinlein fan. I got mom to buy For Us the Living for me when it came out.
Either Fark.Com or slashdot carried a story I read about this book. It mentioned that on Electrolite (The blog of Patric and Theresa Nielsen Hayden) there was a big discussion of the book by some of the current luminaries of SF and some of the backbone people of NASA.
I read the whole conversation, but never posted.
This was where I first ran across Scott (go buy his book now, I'll be here when you get back and it is probably better than whatever you were going to read next anyway) Lynch.
I've got another friend who was half of why I joined Live Journal and who I was having a bit of an arguement with at the time (I think we both read too much and too little in the other's position, and I'd like to say the whole thing was entirely past at this late date) (whose webcomic you should go read. Go ahead, I'll be here when you get back.) and well, she made a public post about the topic of the arguement (not our arguement, but her own crusade for this particular matter) that quoted an essay by someone else (who I think wasn't entirely right) and was perhaps the least little bit hyperbolic about how the essay matched with her postion (which it actually didn't have a one to one match with, but it was close) and which inspired a huge lj arguement with various people some of which were rather quite nasty about the whole thing, way beyond what I (who was, you'll recall, still having my own headted disagreement with her, though at the time it had really petered off into occasional snarls and glares) thought was reasonable or necessary. I sort of maybe asked the people who were ragging her for citing an article in support of her thesis that wasn't just a restatement of her thesis what their majors in college were. And I might have mentioned that I was interested in going back and getting another degree but not wanting one where things like citing articles was an issue. I may have mentioned wanting a degree that I could finish without substantial effort. But I'm sure I was tactful about it (and no fair looking for the arguement that's cheating.) Well, that's where I met Jenn. Who was working at night job at a hotel, something that gave her lots of computer time during my main computer time times (I was in Oregon she was in the Midwest, the time difference was in favor of me actually catching her in her down times) so we ended up spending a lot of time talking via some IM client or another.
Jenn is engaged to Scott.
I ended up talking to Scott (via live journal) a fair amount.
In Scott's journal I came to interact with Elizabeth (Who also has most of a score of novels written and more to come, a total of 15 written, a few not actually on the shelves yet. Go buy this one, let me borrow it when you are done. I'm broke.)
Elizabeth is writing all sorts of things, and knows more about Dead English Writer People than I knew there was to know. She also writes about Spaceships and 50 year old women warriors with cybernetics that need updating and secrets that need hiding and about quirky networkded AIs who could probably pass the Turing Test with whatever it is that an AI would do to make it harder to accomplish a task done.) 15 books. That is a daunting figure. It is backed up by a ready grasp of science (which isn't daunting to me) and literary theory and history (Daunting! We'll see that one pop up again) and Automechanics (my worst subject on the ASVAB) (Some day I'd love to debate third wave feminism and particularly feminist epistemology with her. I bet she'd tie me in ribbons, but it would be all sorts of fun, if I had 3 months to bone up on the subject.) She is also writing things with Sarah.
Sarah has a PhD. in English stuff that I sort of faked my way through in Primary School and talked my advisor into letting me skip in College. This makes talking about the nuts and bolts of writing with her a daunting process. She writes books alone too. Go. Buy. Return. I'll be here.
Sarah talks about the nooks and crannies and the neat thiongs and the silly things about this wonderous glorious supergenre called Fantasy and Science Fiction. She claims that science makes her a little nervous, so she makes occasional mistakes in the discussion. "It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring."
Well I mentioned Nancy Kress, who writes Hard SF where the science takes a background and the people are fully realized.
Patrick Neilsen Hayden replies to my comment and talks about how people often miss that she is writing Hard SF
It turns out that he may well have planted the Kress==Hard SF meme in my head in, you know it, the Electrolite Thread that started this whole chain of events.
Oh, and the next post in that thread? It is about Cory Doctrow who is a major poster on a shared news/civil liberties blog called boingboing. Mr. Doctrow's writing is 1/3 at fault for why my eyes hurt right now. I spent three days ending 2 days ago staring at a screen reading the first 3 and some change years of that blog on a monitor attached to a messed up video card that makes long reading as bad as on the old monitors back in 93. The boing boing link of this chain doesn'g go anywhere yet. http://www.boingboing.net
I was rereading a section of http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004356.html#004356 when I ran across this:
"For that matter, many new areas of study go through a phase of being seen as an all-curing tool; remember when AI was going to change the world? Or biotech? Or e-business?"
Know what?
We are currently in a world full of ai. It isn't the talking self aware AI that many people think of when they talk about AI, but it is AI none the less, and it is/has transformed the world. I suspect that from the view point of history, the last thirty years and maybe the next ten will be seen as a huge shift in the world and one that occured much faster than the industrial revolution.
Biotech? Biotech is just beginning to be felt, but it has already made itself known. We grow a fair number of our drugs in vats already. Ice Minus is quietly used on crops across the world in conjunction with weather satelites (another application of AI) to make various frost sensitive crops more viable. BGH and HGH have had their own impacts. There is a race going on right now between the microbiologists and the chemists to be the first one out the gates with the next metal concentration technology (currently the microbiologists are winning. But then they were able to find what they needed in nature, often at the very sites that needed them.) Superfund sites and oil spills are currently being cleaned up in part by the products of biotech. The EU's (and the green/environmental movement's) complete and unresonable rejection of GM crops is going to turn around and bite them in their collective asses as the years go on. By their reasoning, we ought to pull peanuts off the market because a bunch of folks are deathly allergic to them. (If they were pro-GM they'd be in a position to kill the negativeest aspects of the tech, mainly the kill switch genes, though at least the EU has been particularly stupid about IP issues to date, and the herbicide resistance genes. Instead they are seen as the enemies by the people doing the work with the biggest potential to make the world green again.) New Biotech crops are doing neat things like cutting the cycle time (and thus acerage) needed by the timber industry to grow various types of wood and adding needed vitamins to staple crops in regions where malnutrition is still the biggest problem facing the population.
E-commerce? Who knows where that will go. It won't fizzle, but it may not be a real revolution on its own. (When crossed with AI though...)
I was rereading a section of http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004356.html#004356 when I ran across this:
"For that matter, many new areas of study go through a phase of being seen as an all-curing tool; remember when AI was going to change the world? Or biotech? Or e-business?"
Know what?
We are currently in a world full of ai. It isn't the talking self aware AI that many people think of when they talk about AI, but it is AI none the less, and it is/has transformed the world. I suspect that from the view point of history, the last thirty years and maybe the next ten will be seen as a huge shift in the world and one that occured much faster than the industrial revolution.
Biotech? Biotech is just beginning to be felt, but it has already made itself known. We grow a fair number of our drugs in vats already. Ice Minus is quietly used on crops across the world in conjunction with weather satelites (another application of AI) to make various frost sensitive crops more viable. BGH and HGH have had their own impacts. There is a race going on right now between the microbiologists and the chemists to be the first one out the gates with the next metal concentration technology (currently the microbiologists are winning. But then they were able to find what they needed in nature, often at the very sites that needed them.) Superfund sites and oil spills are currently being cleaned up in part by the products of biotech. The EU's (and the green/environmental movement's) complete and unresonable rejection of GM crops is going to turn around and bite them in their collective asses as the years go on. By their reasoning, we ought to pull peanuts off the market because a bunch of folks are deathly allergic to them. (If they were pro-GM they'd be in a position to kill the negativeest aspects of the tech, mainly the kill switch genes, though at least the EU has been particularly stupid about IP issues to date, and the herbicide resistance genes. Instead they are seen as the enemies by the people doing the work with the biggest potential to make the world green again.) New Biotech crops are doing neat things like cutting the cycle time (and thus acerage) needed by the timber industry to grow various types of wood and adding needed vitamins to staple crops in regions where malnutrition is still the biggest problem facing the population.
E-commerce? Who knows where that will go. It won't fizzle, but it may not be a real revolution on its own. (When crossed with AI though...)
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