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The first stop on our week-long trip was Hoover Dam.

To say it’s awe-inspiring is an understatement. Things of that scale are almost frightening, both its size and its implications.

The enormity of the structure is almost as breathtaking as that of the Grand Canyon. Approaching it, you know it’s going to be big, but once you see it, you think, “I didn’t think it would be quite that big.” And it’s not just the dam that’s huge — everything connected to it is enormous: Lake Mead is the largest man-made lake in America; the overflow tunnels, with a diameter of 50 feet, are big enough to drive a truck through.

But it’s the implications that are frightening. Built from 1931 to 1935, Hoover Dam was completed two years ahead of schedule and under budget! Six companies, from Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and California, pooled their resources to create a structure so complicated that procedures and tools had to be invented to complete it.

For instance, the heat created by the chemical reactions of concrete drying would have stretched the process of the concrete setting and drying to 125 years. To combat this, engineers designed a system whereby tubes were run through the concrete and cool water pumped throughout the whole structure. But a refrigeration unit that had such a cooling capacity? It didn’t exist. Yet.

So here’s all this innovation and creation and genius going into one of the most complicated structures in history at a time when a significant part of our population was treated like animals and a psychopath in Europe was laying plans to slaughter six million people because of their religious/ethnic heritage.

Humans can’t be manipulated as easily as concrete, I suppose. Well, I take that back. Humans can be manipulated just as easily as anything else, but most of the time, it’s manipulation towards evil.

More implications: Can anyone imagine an enormous project like Boston’s “The Big Dig” project going under budget and well within the projected time frame? Can anyone imagine Haliburton delivering its services on budget, let alone under?

Still, all these thoughts passed quickly through my mind: we spent most of the time in gaping-mouth awe.

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For the last several months, I’ve been hearing more about the iPhone on NPR while driving to work than I really cared to.

The phenomenon is a fascinatingly, achingly-perfect example of our consumer culture. All of the reporting I heard on NPR was about the wonderous technology and gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.

Or sometimes about people who feel they’ve gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.

People standing in line; people paying people to stand in line. Lines, everywhere — if reports are to be believed. People waiting to buy; people waiting to try: to the former, “Do you have nothing better to do with your money?” and to the latter, “Do you have nothing better to do with your time?”

I really just don’t get it. It’s a phone that plays music, and accomplishes it without a keypad. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing that turns our conception of the universe on its head. Bohr, Plank, and Einstein would have all been impressed, I’m sure.

Perhaps I’m just one of those “old fashioned” types that thinks a phone that is just a phone is sufficient. My phone is two years old, and if I don’t have to get a new one to renew my contract, I probably won’t, because I just don’t care. It rings; I talk — end of story.

If I want to listen to music, I’ll use my iPod…

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The first time I was in Polska, I started making a little ‘zine that I’d mail out to friends and family. I called it “Entropy.”

I remember that yesterday evening and wondered who had “entropy.com.” I knew it wouldn’t be available, and I typed “entropy.com” in the address bar.It re-directed me to “entropy.ie”.

“Entropy — Secure Networking.”

I’m not sure how much faith I’d put into a networking security company that’s taken its name from a principle of decay.

What would its logo be? A frayed networking cable?

Anticipating user confusion, the company included this explanation:

Conall Lavery founder of Entropy decided upon the name after reading a book called “The Crying of Lot 49″ by the American author Thomas Pynchon.

In the book the professor uses the two theories of Entropy (thermodynamics and communications) and invents a perpetual motion machine that is driven by telepathy.

There are various definitions of Entropy.

According to the Collins dictionary, Entropy means “a thermodynamic quantity that changes in a reversible process by an amount equal to the heat absorbed or emitted divided by the thermodynamic temperature.”

In my view, that doesn’t help clarify things that much.

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