Today’s New York Times carries an article entitled “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” about Bill Gates going around to universities encouraging young people to major in computer science. The chairman of EECS at MIT worries about the decline in enrollment (10 years ago his predecessor fretted about the explosion in enrollment; sic transit gloria major). All too close to home…
Hmm… this Manila software that Harvard runs seems to have mislinked all the comments posted. I’m cutting and pasting some manually and please feel free to use the comments button underneath this posting to comment on the original (below).
From Zoran Lazarevic:
Two hundred years in a history of a nation is a short time to change human behavior without force. For one example, think that slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, but the first black generation that grew in freedom and equality was born in 1970s.
Compare today Serbs living a couple of miles away: across the river Danube which marked the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire (north) and the Ottoman empire (south). In the north, they live in neatly painted houses lined along geometrically straight roads, behind tall walls keeping the privacy of their property. Villages just south of Danube are hectically built around worn-out curvy roads, having short transparent fences displaying property in slight disarray. The north prides itself with culinary craft and the taste for fine arts from Austria and Hungary. The south takes pride in warriorship and macho attitude, and jokes about its own widespread bribery.
Serbia proper was liberated from the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, and united with the north in 1918. There is absolutely no question, that if separated, the two regions would have very different economies. Just like there are vast differences between other ex-Yugoslavia states. And that is all after a century of common life, mostly under communism which tried to kill out (pun intended) all differences in religion and nationality.
From Fazal Majid:
You could blame Lazare Carnot (d. 1823) for fathering Sadi Carnot (d. 1832), the inventor of thermodynamics, and thus leading to global warming…
