"
Gee-whiz, but that scared me out of a year's growth."
File this under "
Gee-whiz, Captain Obvious"--Political Correctness once again reared its rotting, pus-filled head at the recent Academy Awards ceremony.
It seems that the facilities industry lags a bit behind the advances being made on the tech side, which, despite all of the
gee-whiz hype, amount to computers doing what they do best--the repetitive tasks that bore humans to tears.
There is a distinct change of tone in the middle of the story, when the initial "
gee-whiz" excitement of the autonomous car's extreme capabilities begins to fade into the background of a complex stew of romantic and other growing-up problems experienced by the four teens.
("Shoptalk: Only Entrepreneurs Will Save Journalism," July 2017) Hoping that somewhere, somehow, there will be a
gee-whiz technology moment for a business model that will reverse the current trend with the news industry seems less than a solution than a parent reassuring a child that everything will work out in the end.
And second, the animals and environments on offer aren't nearly as exotic--mostly wolves and wild horses--limiting the
gee-whiz factor to audiences younger than might have turned out for the pair's acclaimed earlier collaborations.
The
gee-whiz aspects of big dinosaurs and other bizarre critters aren't the meat of the book; it's Prothero's careful description of 25 fossils that offer an overview of the progression of plants and animals in the last 3.5 billion years.
Some of the
gee-whiz technologies going into new cars--hands-off parking, say--seem more like an excuse for showing off than a real advance.
What's most striking about Inside Out isn't its inside-the-brain
gee-whiz design, but that it's probably Pixar's most directly human story yet: An 11-year-old girl, growing up.
Genetic privacy is a hugely complicated problem ("10 Breakthrough Technologies: Internet of DNA," March/April 2015), but MIT Technology Review treats it as some sort of side note or inconvenience in the way of the latest
gee-whiz technical development.
Kasem weaved stories around the songs, anecdotes about interactions with fans or
gee-whiz tales about how stars got their starts.
It's not that the device doesn't deliver enough
gee-whiz factor for weather geeks, or provide at least some utility for a number of outdoor activities--including watersports (we used it on a boat where it was helpful for docking).