Currently, I’m sitting in one of my new favorite places to sit and do work. On the top floor the UCI science library, I can look out the window and see an uncountable amount of amazing things. For example, the window that I sit at has a perfect view of the airspace that is used by the southern runway at John Wayne Airport (SNA). I can sit here for hours at a time, doing the work I need to do, and watching the daily miracle of human flight unfold in front of me. Each airplane that takes off and lands contains hundreds of people, each with a reason and a story included in why they boarded a plane today. I watch as these gigantic behemoths manage so gracefully the insurmountable tasks of taking off and landing over and over again in rapid succession. As each one lands, it looks all so simple that its hard to imagine a world that existed without these machines that glide so easily through the sky, carrying so much humanity inside of them.
If the miracle of human flight does not suffice to interest me, then out the same window I can watch cars drive in both directions on the toll highway 73. I count out ten seconds on my laptop’s clock and watch fourteen vehicles heading northbound towards downtown Irvine or highway 405. That’s, at minimum, fourteen different lives, each with a reason that they are all on that road right now. All this can been seen within ten short seconds. I can think for hours about how the tolls being charged on that road not only provides the road with its own source of financing, but change incentives such that traffic externalities are controlled. Not only does highway 73 manage its own traffic, but its existence helps manage traffic on other highways, such as the more famous, and vitally important, highways 405 and 5. If the economics is not enough to consider, then the engineering of the highway itself could be a source of wonder. The tons of concrete, the gigantic capital equipment of cranes and trucks, and so much more were not even in existence not that long ago. It would have likely taken the entire resources and lifetime of the Roman empire to build the road that I’m looking at right now. Today, we can build this road in a few short years, if even that, and its more of an afterthought than a grand project.
All of these things are amazing by themselves, but they are likewise amazing because I often seem to be the only person that ever sees them this way. In all my life thus far, I rarely have met anyone that even notices these things, and have never found a person that looks at them with the reverence and awe that I have come to have. I say all this because yesterday was a day that was monumental in two ways, and I feel like I was the only who noticed or even cared.
First, as of yesterday, February 3rd, 2011, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) assigned the very last block of IPv4 addresses. This is big news in the IT community, but for the most part the rest of the world shrugged. (I might write later on what economic impacts should be expected, and how quickly the world might now have to move to IPv6 in response to the now very real shortage of addresses.) This is such a monumental event that I am in some way hoping that people will create a holiday to remember February 3rd as IPv4 exhaustion day. The internet is a part of everything that is done in the modern world today. The IPv4 address space contained 
Then, after I learned that it was in fact IPv4 Exhaustion Day, I hopped into a car to head out to Brea to perform with the lion group that I’ve been a part of here at UCI. Since this performance had only really been referred to as “The Brea Performance” I had no idea where it was that the group was going that day. As the car pulled into the parking lot, my jaw almost dropped. We were performing at the global headquarters of Beckman Coulter. When I turned in excitement to say, “Do you realize where we are? Do you know who these people are and what they do?” I came quickly to the sad realization that nobody in the group had even ever heard of the company. Here I was, standing in the beautiful compound of one of the greatest medical companies in the United States, and everyone was completely oblivious.
To put the miracle that is Beckman Coulter in context, consider the following. When I worked as a phlebotomist, I probably saw and helped to treat several hundred, to perhaps a low thousand, patients. When I worked in the laboratory, it was claimed that 80% of treatment decisions made by doctors were based on the data collected in the clinical laboratory, so the job of the laboratory was pretty serious stuff. During my tenure at St. Joseph Hospital, the hospital probably saw and treated patients somewhere in the tens of thousands. (I was always found these numbers hard to believe, until I was actually seeing them being run myself.) Now, consider that the vast majority of the tests that were done in our laboratory were run on Beckman Coulter’s machines. The determined the treatment of almost every patient in the hospital. Between Beckman Coulter and BD (Becton, Dickinson, and Company), their products were used in every aspect of my life for almost two years. Those lab results saved lives, hundreds of them, in our hospital, and Beckman Coulter’s machines are in almost every clinical laboratory in the United States, and in many more around the world. When you add it all up, the Beckman Coulter corporation is responsible for saving or improving hundreds of millions of lives. Here I was in the headquarters of this corporation playing for their Chinese New Year party, and all I could think about was the hundreds of millions of lives the people in front of me had saved because of the work they were doing in that building, and I was the only person that saw that.
I suppose it’s simply a factor of our modern world that all these things go unnoticed. If we didn’t live in an abstraction and tried to take in the scope of everything that is surrounding us today, we would never be able to function. I suppose being able to see all these things is why I’m so passionate about the study of economics. It allows me a method to digest the daily miracle of the modern world. I just wish that once in a while, I wasn’t the only person sitting at a window watching airplanes.
