Sunday, July 6, 2008

Younger than McCain

Someone else is already keeping track of things younger than McCain on an alright blog, so we won't be making that a recurring feature here. But I have been independently researching this topic at work, and some of the answers are astounding. Bebop, for instance, was born and petered out more or less between McCain's third and 24th birthdays. The Chaplin movie Modern Times came out after his birth. He was nine days younger than Wilt Chamberlain, who retired in the seventies and died in 1999. Every Disney animated feature, from Snow White on, is younger than McCain.
With this in mind, McCain's admitted ignorance of computers actually makes sense- any viable candidate would be younger than the computer as we know it today. But McCain is older than the bombe, the first modern computer, used to crack enigma machine messages from the Nazis, and he's about the same age as the Turing machine, the whole theory that led to the creation of computers. Granted, you'd expect someone born in 1895 to have figured out the car by 1966, but maybe not if he always had a chauffeur to do it for him.
In our next post, we'll compare the lives of McCain and another, younger famous American from his era.

1 comment:

taylor said...

i passed the turing test. fucking shut up about it already nerdcommunity.