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From: cipher@mmm.UUCP (Andre Guirard)
Newsgroups: net.misc,net.bio
Subject: Re: World population benchmark
Message-ID: <1021@mmm.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Jul-86 09:48:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmm.1021
Posted: Tue Jul 15 09:48:51 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Jul-86 05:30:46 EDT
References: <3553@hplabsb.UUCP> <599@bcsaic.UUCP> <12305@amdcad.UUCP>
Reply-To: cipher@mmm.UUCP (Andre Guirard)
Distribution: net
Organization: 3M Company, St. Paul, Minn.
Lines: 25
Keywords: Billions and billions, population, United Nations
Xref: watmath net.misc:9896 net.bio:608

In article <12305@amdcad.UUCP> phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai) writes:
>In article <599@bcsaic.UUCP> michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael maxwell) writes:
>>it makes me wonder why there aren't more people like
>>Plato, Galileo, Michaelangelo, Bach, Einstein.  (Or, heaven help us, 
>>more like Genghis Khan, Hitler, Alexander, Attila the Hun, etc.)  
>
>I nominate Donald Knuth of Stanford. Watson and Crick (sp?) who
>discovered the structure of DNA.  I don't know of any current music or
>art of lasting value, however.

Well, I don't know about that!

Probably there _are_ people alive today, many people, whom the future will
regard as geniuses (if any historical record of this time survives).  But
geniuses tend not to be recognized in their own time, so we don't know
who they are yet.  To discover whether something is of lasting value,
it is usually necessary to wait 50 or 100 years and see if it's still
valuable.  If just anyone (Phil Ngai, for instance) could tell, then we
would _all_ be geniuses, wouldn't we?
-- 

  /'C`\	 TWALG ASHALC RITMOHF.			Andre Guirard
 ( o_o )					Botoj de timeco
 )) _ (( AWSWG SWVVG BWSWBSWH!			ihnp4!mmm!cipher
///   \\\