Progress!

I saw a couple of stories on Slashdot that, taken together, provide a nice example of how I often feel about the world. I know I usually keep you in suspense until you click the link, but here I'm going to outline them directly, because that's called "trying something new".

The first one describes an advanced kind of cooling fan for your computer's processor. It is ingenious, efficient, and will make computers easier to build and operate. This is a good thing on all accounts, provided it can be produced in a way that is not prohibitive. Really cool, right? (Sorry, it's early- ignore the pun.)

But then comes the second story, in which scientists have managed to make a room-temperature superconductor. What's so great about that, you ask? Well, for starters, superconductors don't generate any noticeable amount of heat when electricity flows through them. So if you build a processor out of this stuff, you can probably get away with not installing a cooling unit. At all.

So we have an invention which does its job better and more efficiently than previous inventions of its genre, and is a kind of revolutionary. Then, two seconds later, there's an invention that totally invalidates and obsolesces (hey, spell check didn't ding me on that!) the first gizmo. (There's the spell check ding.) I kind of feel for the folks who came up with the first invention. They're obviously very bright and talented; they've made something that should, for all the world, change the way we think about cooling processors. Except that if this superconductor thing gets off the ground, we won't have to think about cooling processors at all.

Kind of makes you think, huh?