A "nine-days' wonder" is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day. -- R. A. Heinlein (1952)

The Washington Post informs me that the Very Long Baseline Array, a string of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Caribbean, "functions in certain respects like a single instrument with nearly the diameter of the Earth. Recently, the operators of the VLBA learned how to take into account subtle, data-skewing effects [such] as continental drift." In my youth, continental drift was no longer crackpot, but it was still controversial. My college geology text (1951) devotes 5 pages to the idea, treating it seriously but skeptically. These days, of course, you can go on the Web & watch an animation (not by Disney) of India tearing itself off from Antarctica, rushing north, and smashing into Asia. But you don't even have to be interested in geology to be concerned about continental drift. It has become *a nuisance to astronomers*.

That reminded me of something I read with some amazement last year: that the software for the GPS includes a correction for general-relativistic effects. When I was little, general relativity was publicized as an extreme of intellectual audacity, whose understanding required arcane mathematics & whose triumph depended on exquisite measurements. Now, it is something that the maintainers of a public utility -- in historical terms, lighthouse keepers -- need to know about. If they did not pay attention to Einstein, busses would announce the wrong stops.

It happens in politics too. The Post also recently reported a remark made by President Obama at a press conference. There is to be a White House dog, and the president had been rumored to be about to renege on his intention, as a good citizen, to rescue it from a dog pound rather than buy one of respectable lineage. He said "A lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me". According to Wikipedia s.v. miscegenation laws, at the time that Barack Obama was conceived (November 1960), that act would have been felonious in 22 states of the union (not, I am happy to say, including Hawaii). Now it is something he can make a *good-natured* joke about. I dare say, indeed, that in Alabama, Mississippi, & Louisiana there are people my age who ground their dentures when they read about that; but they no longer hold the rest of us hostage. In that particular, we can actually take common sense & common decency for granted.