Before I forget, I thought that I might mention that tomorrow, Saturday,
October 4 is the 40th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, the first
artificial satellite of Earth.

In the short list of historical "big deals," this truly was a big deal.
Although Soviet in origin, Sputnik overnight transformed the United States.
The notions of "progressive" education came to end on October 4th. New high
schools were immediately funded and built, dedicated wholly to the idea of
restoring discipline in education. College entrance SAT scores in 1963-1966,
for the children who graduated and who benefited from the panic that
immediately ensued after Sputnik, rose to their highest point ever in those
years and unfortunately have been on rather steady decline ever since.

More lasting, the level of technical innovation that occurred in the years
following Sputnik has never abated -- due in great part that graduate schools
throughout the United States were made quite excellent almost overnight. The
US Congress instituted the National Defense Education Act, an act that
transformed American high-level education (and consequently, American society
at large) in the same way that the G.I. Bill did after World War II.

Further, we went, as a whole people, from launching a small, 184-pound
artificial moon to landing on the Moon in less than 12 years, "not because it
was easy, but because it was hard." Although most of the activity that
immediately followed Sputnik forty years ago was born out of the most
profound of fears, the results have been, on the whole, exceptionally
beneficial and greatly liberating. Communication satellites and photographs
taken from the Moon of the Earth have had a fundamental psychological
transforming effect on us all -- and have made it much harder for us to see
each other as anything other than fellow travelers on a small, blue planet.

Similarly, the rise of computers, high-speed transportation, and
instantaneous world-wide communications that followed on after Sputnik -- and
most especially, now the Internet -- have, or are now in the process of,
transforming the world in a manner that will make it increasingly more
difficult to align the world into camps that wage global war on themselves
ever again.

Wirt Atmar