IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Patrick Juola juola at mathcs.duq.edu
Tue Sep 22 16:52:31 EST 1998


In article <KETIL-873e9j7ug6.fsf at tosca.infotek.no>,
Ketil Z Malde  <ketil at ii.uib.no> wrote:
>smwei at umich.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
>
>> Maynard Handley (handleym at ricochet.net) wrote:
>
>> : Jesus
>
>Jesus would of course qualify as Man of the Previous Millenium
>
>> : I said that the big things that changed everyone's lives over the last one
>> : thousand years were for the most part caused by white European (and in the
>> : last 1/4 of those thousand years North American) males. 
>
>> your parenthesis, however, strikes me as the funniest things I've read
>> in this thread. 
>
>I think he means that in the last 250 years, North American males have
>also been very influential, in addition to the European ones, not that
>only North Americans have been.
>
>However, a millenium is a mighty long time, and I'd like to point out
>that the Chinese invented stuff like paper, printing, compasses,
>firearms, and of course a bunch of philosophies...unfortunately, they
>don't seem to have retained the names of inventors (with the exception
>of the philosophies), and a lot of that may have been in previous
>millennia.  No match for Jesus. :-)

There's also not a continuous tradition of development and improvement;
Chinese printing technology stalled in the (European) high middle
ages and wasn't improved upon until the IMPORTATION of metal type.
Similarly, Leif Erikson "discovered" America in around 1000 CE, but
didn't follow it up, which is why Leif Erikson is relegated to a
historical footnote and Columbus is largely credited with being the
European who opened up the Americas to colonization.  

And I still don't see what the hell this has to do with AI.

	-kitten



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