Be Excellent To Each Other

So, throughout history we have examples of 'great people' doing 'great things'. Some examples straight off the top of my head would be Nikolai Tesla, responsible for AC motors and our understanding of AC current. Marie Curie, who discovered radioactive elements like radium and so I suppose also Becquerel as well, who started this trend and worked with her and her husband, resulting in a Nobel prize! Da Vinci, Einstein, Edison...

Who are the modern versions of these sort of people? People who have, through their work, made such an impact on the world as to change it and leave their mark. Does Mark Zuckerberg count as a modern great? Does Osama Bin Laden? Arguably, these people have changed the world. Do we still have great engineers and inventors, or has everything been discovered already?

Suggestions and discussion please!

Bill Gates. Not so much for Microsoft, but for his philanthropy -- dropping tens of billions of dollars into carefully chosen worthy causes will be causing ripple effects for decades to come.

I had heard of his charity work, is it Melinda his wife is called? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sounds like something I've heard. Educate us, tell us what sort of projects he commits to for those of us who don't know!

Steve Wozniak? I know there are some that would credit him with essentially creating the desktop PC concept.

Edit: I suppose that's not really modern is it. But he is still alive and Segwaying around at least.

If you have someone you think, pitch them. Introduce them and give us wee explanation of what they have done. Work on the assumption none of us have heard of them before. then we will learn something, or our interst may be piqued and we can go and look for more info!

Matt Squirrel.

Not that off topic as it discusses a similar set of thoughts but i have to linkto the current XKCD which has Zombie Marie Curie !

Tim Berners-Lee: Made the interwebs

Some interesting key points from there-
Bill and Melinda Gates were named Times Persons of the Year in 2005 for their charity work, along with Bono.
The donations from the foundationeach year amount to a minimum of $1.5 billion.
They are using some of the money to encourage saving in the worlds poor.
They have a huge impact on Global Health; they give approx $800 million a year to global health and provide 17% of the worldwide budget for the attempted eradication of Polio. They are also spending money on researching HIV/Aids and TB vaccines.

They donate to agricultural development programs for poor people in areas such as Africa and seem to have a history of making sizeable donations to disaster funds, giving $500,000 to the Kashmir Earthquake and $3 million to the Indian Ocean Earthquake.
They also donate strongly to education programs within the US and elsewhere with a variety of sponsorship type programs.

By the sounds of everything they are doing, they are having a genuine and noticeable impact on people's lifes, helping them to acheive things that might otherwise have been closed off to them and demonstrating some real social mobility. This coupled with what Gaywood mentioned shows just how influential Bill and Melinda Gates appear to be. Since the big drung companies have no financial incentive to properly research and cure a lot of the conditions the Gates' take an interest in then it is wondeful and remarkable to see how much they are giving to try and solve this. It certainly doesn't seem fantastical to suggest that they could be part of the solution to curing some disease and pulling people out of poverty.

I was aware they did charitable work but I had no idea it was on this scale. Really inspirational.

Wasn't that Al Gore?

Vinod Khosla, mainly for investments into cleantech.

The rest of you suck at this by the way. You are supposed to be putting forward a debate as to why this persons accomplishments have changed the world, or why you controversially think that they haven't. Champion your suggestions!
Don't say, Jimmy Jacket-inventor of jackets.
Say Jimmy Jacket-inventor of jackets. Without these, we would have evolved with no arms to prevent them from freezing off and killing us in cold weather. We couldn't have gone exploring and so would never have discovered other countries. We would all keep losing our keys because Jimmy also invented pockets.
For other people reading, play Devils Advocate. Challenge the suggestions, start a debate even if you agree with them. A bit of challenging and educating conversation on a Tuesday is a great way to perk up the week!

What is cleantech please? Anyway you could sum up, for people not able to click on links or without team to read a full wikipedia entry?

Clean technology includes recycling, renewable energy (wind power, solar power, biomass, hydropower, biofuels), information technology, green transportation, electric motors, green chemistry, lighting, and many other appliances that are now more energy efficient. It is a means to create electricity and fuels, with a smaller environmental footprint and minimise pollution.

Bill Gates is a twat.

Do your own homework! Gilly, Cookie has stolen your account details!

We all are.
With the rise (and rise) of social media, people are turning away from traditional sources of information and looking instead at things written by everybody - when the 7/7 bombings happened in London, people used Twitter to see what was going on, even more so nowadays. Wikipedia is written by everyone, and while it's cool to snort and say "Well, it's wrong about everything", that, of course, makes you a fucking dick, because it has an immense amount of accurate stuff on there. YouTube lets us watch films made by anyone, about any subject we like. Blogs and blogging services are changing the way we get our news - we're getting pickier about what sort of media we give our time to and we like it (generally) in small chunks. If the Metro wasn't free, there wouldn't be many commuters reading newspapers on the train.

But isn't that just reporting on what happens, not necessarily making things happen...

Nah, there's plenty of original content, especially on stuff geared that way like YouTube and Flickr.

I've just realised that I'm ripping off Time magazine.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 14,00.html

ME.

Thatcher, for shaping modern Britain.

And inventing Mr Whippy ice cream.

*shudders*

Edison wasn't great. He was a thief and a cockend.

This is the extent of my contribution.

The Great Soprendo.

People know about famous historical folks because they're taught about them in school. Now we've left school, we don't find out about people any more.

The Great Gatsby.

Nah, we find out about them from Cracked.com .

Also, no doubt great advances are being made but we either don't recognise them at the time, or only hear of them after their creators have passed away.

That's kind of what I meant. Hindsight tells us what feats/achievements are groundbreaking, so it's the historians who identify the great people.

Got to nominate Evan Hill of Al Jazeera, to be honest. And that other chap, the one who helped make Restrepo and died covering the Libyan civil war. And several others. Not just reporting the news, but defying tyrants and risking their lives to do so, in a total media blackout.

Yeah, but someone doing something on YouTube or Twitter is hardly going to get them remembered for all time. I mean, it's possible that a couple of people might, but not everyone. Sure, there's a lot more user driven content in the world that we have access to, but the random user of social media is hardly a groundbreaking, epoch-shattering, paradigm-shifting person.

And I think they're harder to identify these days. Back in 'the day', science was far less specialised, so people could be experts in many fields, and create funky things on their own. These days, to create something useful and important you almost always need a massive team of 'boffins', and the backing of a lot of moolah, often in the form of a big-ass company.

So it's harder for individuals to be recognised for their work, and the figureheads tend to get noticed. So you have the likes of Gates and Jobs, but the code monkey or lab-tech with the petri dishes will rarely get the glory any more (and the mainstream media isn't interested in it anyway).

I'd nominate the people who mapped the human genome. That's about the most 'personable' of projects I can think of in modern science... but I'd be lying if I said I knew who did it.

Stephen Fry.

Self aggrandizing, self serving arseholes who diminish the efforts of our armed forces, most of whom put their lives at risk for nothing more than a shoddy house and £20k a year, fighting for someone else's freedom. You want great people, how about them, not your pretentious media student who got on TV because daddy knows the news desk producer.

How about James Dyson and Richard Branson?

Malc

Good grief, are you drunk?

Number of British soldiers who went into Libya unarmed to report what was happening there, and were subsequently killed: 0.

Come to think of it, number of British soldiers who went into Libya AT ALL: 0.

Effects of British army on 'freedom' in the Middle East: (embarassed silence)

Yeah, that's a good one. Done plenty in his lifetime already and now at the forefront of Space Tourism too.

Branson is a good choice.

I submit Brian Blessed, and Patrick Moore. Even for this alone. How cool can an octogenarian astronomer get?

I just don't have the energy to respond to this.

Clearly you do.

Tony the Tiger.

Oh yeah.

Smilie fail.

DUFF! My hero.

"I was drinking 10 bottles of wine a day. I was tapering".

I've never seen a more astonishingly wrong post.

Seventy two journalists were killed in 2012. Exactly one thousand since 1992. Thirty three so far this year. Those figures are as high as the average attrition rates for the British army. Many of them are directly targeted. Yet they still go.

Tim Hetherington worked menial jobs so he could afford night courses in photography. He graduated, studied under Dan Meadows and spent the next decade unheralded working in Africa documenting the political upheavals there. He then took a break to do investigative work for the UN Liberia Sanctions Committee. When he went to Afghanistan it was becoming the forgotten war owing to the death in Iraq, but it was still dangerous. His film Restrepo is an excellent piece of work and won the Grand Jury Prize. He was killed by a mortar in Libya. Alongside him died photographers Chris Hondras and Anton Hamerl. We also lost Marie Colvin. Many more photographers have died since in Syria.

Go here for more information: http://cpj.org/

Incidently, Hetherington's Restrepo was not politicially motivated or themed, and contented itself with showing how soldiers live under siege both physically and psychologically in remote outposts in Afghanistan. He lived with them for months and the platoon he was with all mourn him.

Try looking at things before mouthing off.

...Two years ago.

... *Costanza style confused casting about pause* ....

YEAH! YOU HEARD ME!

I fear that last sentence was a somewhat poor choice.