And we keep wondering why our kids might have to learn Mandarin for 2nd language..

Recently in the news, call it a tale of two countries if you will

USA:

The republicans have sworn to stop the high speed rail network plan to connect big cities in the US and the democrats may not be able to do much.

Reason? Spending is a bad idea now
What is gained? political clout and voters
What is lost? American competency in building these systems, jobs, greener eventually cheaper transportation over the next century

China:

The government has decided to build a 500 kilometer per hour high speed train system

Reason ? make sure that 10 day traffic jams never happen again and also make China the "only" player in the high speed train making business. (read it carefully.. they don't think "another".. they want "only")

What is gained ? Eventually any country that needs high speed rails will have to get it from China.

What is lost? Probably anyone who has anything in the path of this line that some Chinese official draws on a map will either relocate or disappear from the face of the planet and no one will ever know. Anyone who tries to say anything about this will be jailed. China will be called an evil superpower by everyone else. They will go "So? Duh!"

If you are a materials scientist who migrated to the USA 30-15 years ago, you might have seen how the USA had an edge in materials research because you could say for example get a crucible made out of Beryllia (Beryllium oxide or BeO) which you can use to melt other special materials only from special manufacturers in the USA. Of course you would not even know who made this crucible and how to get your hands on one.

The US made sure that scientists in other countries did not get access to this type of thing. Have actually had many of my professors wish there were plants in India that could be setup for this so they could do the same research as their American counterparts.

Today all those places are dead. Alibaba.com is pretty much the only source and if Alibaba blocks BeO crucibles for non Chinese research other "developed" nations will have to scramble and spend millions of dollars to re-establish an industry they wish they did not let go.

Same thing has happened with Rare Earth Elements. Want to try Lanthanum oxide as your gate dielectric in your transistor? Want Gadolinium or Neodymium as dopants in your exotic vitreous products? Guess what.. you are out of luck. You have to beg the Chinese for it.

When a country goes out of its way to shut down an entire industry by using various practices legal or otherwise and monopolizes that industry someone should do something?

The sad thing is that the US was in this situation 20 years ago. Now the Chinese have their hands on the reins!

Pretty soon we will not have any underwear to wear if the Chinese systematically go out to eliminate Fruit of the loom and Jockeys..

Of course we will all play our part in helping them do this. We will go to Walmart or Costco, look at the price per underwear (those little signs that do the division for you to even out and show you the unit price from a pack of 3, 6, 8 or 10!) and buy the cheaper option. Well, that is the way the world works, no?

There are two options. Make it possible to drop prices of what is made in the USA.. or get the Chinese to sell their product at true cost. American manufacturing is not going to get any cheaper unless our employers can be competitive with the global employer force.

While all that remains a distant dream and maybe my grand kids will see that happen, the only thing left to do in the interim is to not close down factories that do specialty materials in the name of national security interests!

Velcro has pretty much made sure my kids take a long time to learn how to tie a shoe lace! Some know how need to be preserved for our future generations...

be it how to tie your shoe lace, make boondhi laddoo or extracting elements from Yittria ores.

No?

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History

History comes from "Historia" or Knowledge acquired by studying the past!

I seriously have doubts about History, History students and Historians, not just in today's world but the whole concept, be it past, present or, even the future. It sounds like an oxymoron, a concept of future history, but let me elaborate.

The last week has seen me spend significant time with Jr. for her project, a speech she has to give with another student to celebrate Black History. The person she has to talk about is Elijah McCoy. Now this guy was a black inventor with over 40 patents when Slavery had just been abolished, but discrimination was still around. Pretty amazing stuff considering the term "The Real McCoy" which means "the original" or "the dependable" product refers to an oil lubricator that McCoy invented.

The assignment gets complicated because different sources give him different birth dates!? different mother's names, etc. Either a lot was left out and no one cared because he was Black, or people tried to resurrect his image long after he died in the name of Black pride. In either case, history has failed or is failing us by either not telling us the facts or by deliberately misleading us.

If you use the most common search engines for Elijah McCoy, you will see the same few pages come up.

Most of my knowledge/information/history comes from Google news these days and articles get pushed to the front page, simply because more people are reading those articles in specific categories, be it world, politics, sports, science and technology, etc. etc.

Certain concepts reiterate themselves in these search engines. In other words, an article will gain momentum if it catches the public eye. Correlation of that happening because the veracity of the article would be pretty abysmal is my guess. Most of the articles that get pushed in the "recommended" category all seem to be polarized.

a. it is an article that resonates with what would be "common sense" or the "duh" or "stating the obvious"

b. it creates controversy and attracts the flamers and provides an "anti" viewpoint

There seems to be very minimal moderation of ideas or a balanced view. (those articles are a minority), which brings me to some instrospection. What the hell is a balanced view? A neutral view? My view? My biased view? A view with pros and cons or cons and pros?

and the thoughts wandered to a hypothetical..

50 years from now if a kid had to do a school project on George W. Bush what are the odds that he /she will probably see GWB as a peace loving man and how many articles will flag GWB as a warmonger? It all depends on what gets pushed across screens over the next 50 years would be my guess.

Maps of the world conveniently show what each country wants to show its kids in the classroom, you do that for a few decades and you have given millions of kids an alternate reality. Take Kashmir for example.

Kids in China were taught a distorted version of India in the late seventies for sure (know this for a fact from Chinese friends) and kids in India were taught an untrue version of China in our history books. What we read, memorized, regurgitated for 10 marks/100 is not even close to what Chinese kids were told by their parents or what they experienced firsthand.

That said, history is all about screening the information you leave behind so that the suckers who come long after you, believe in something that never happened.

Worse, let us tell them that History teaches us how to shape our lives by learning from the past. If the learning from the past is all based on corrupt data, then the future is going to be very very bleak.

In corporate America information goes to employees on a need to know basis. The country runs the same way with wire taps, extraordinary powers for the state, unwritten laws, etc. etc. with the citizen being the last to know or given little information on how his tax money is spent wisely or unwisely.

If the information that is given by the have's to the have not's is so filtered, then we can be guaranteed that when Google Search replaces our history books for good, our kids will find out things about their parents that will make them shake their heads in disbelief!

I can almost imagine Jr. typing "Sundar Narayanan" into a google window and shaking her head and saying "But I was raised by this fellow and he was nothing like this search result shows!"

One thing is sure.

Jr. will get her 10 points out of 100 for her understanding of Black History.

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