In a couple of gloomy recent posts, I may have suggested it is the worst of times, but in some ways it is the best of times. You just wouldn’t know it from watching the news. There, it is war, famine, pestilence and death. Not to mention a shaky economic recovery, frothy markets and endless talk of a few faddish high fliers that can be imagined doing an Icarus-like nosedive – Tesla, Starbucks, Google, Whole Foods, Michael Kors.

Yet, as Dickens noted, it is always the spring of hope and the winter of despair simultaneously. And, as Randall Jarrell slyly supposed, even in a golden age people go around complaining how yellow everything looks, We are, perhaps, too filled with angst and fixated on the grim headlines describing man’s gory inhumanity to man.

Buried on page 10, there’s often a report on a miracle, of the secular sort. And stock pickers raking through the usual suspects are often stunned when a dark horse with no pedigree laps all the favorites.

I hasten to preface these remarks with a disclaimer. I have now reached the age at which many of the things happening around me appear impossible. This is in keeping with (Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In my youth, I had a working layman’s understanding of combustion engines, jets, rockets, early computers, the idea behind the double helix, but lately some of the things happening appear more like magic or science fiction. Consider just a few recent reports on what clever humans are up to.

Rosetta, a European Space Agency craft launched a decade ago, has achieved its first goal by rendezvousing with a comet and sending back data. The next step is to land on the surface and ride along as the object sweeps on toward the sun and loops back again toward Jupiter.

It soon may be unnecessary to launch the elaborate satellite infrastructure that supports the ubiquitous GPS system that has so greatly improved life on earth. Instead, it may be possible to discover where you are with even finer precision simply by using a device that bases its calculations on the magnetic field of the earth.

Starting in his parents’ garage, where else, a nineteen-year-old kid, Palmer Luckey, has tinkered together a new virtual reality headset that dramatically improves clarity of image, field of vision and eliminates the flaws in seamlessly reproducing virtual reality that have tended to give users headaches or make them nauseous. He first funded his research by raising $2.4 million on Kickstarter to create the so-called Oculus Rift headset. His start-up has now been acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

I know what fuddy-duddies like myself are thinking. It’s the Decline of the West, another nerd boy makes billions addicting his fellow nerd boys to brain-dead video games that are more realistic than ever. Yes, but… The Oculus images are so realistic that it may be a game changer in fields beyond gaming. It could for instance permit long distance learning that can put you in a far off classroom or lab, allow online doctors to examine a patient as real as if in their own offices, or let robots and spacecraft beam back images from places too dangerous or far off for humans to visit. And war will no doubt be waged with the aid of such headsets; drone pilots for starters may be early adopters.

A report from ScienceDaily describes the creation of a small robotic device that can be 3-D printed on a piece of paper able to fold itself into a preprogrammed shape and walk away – an origami transformer, cyborg geometry in action.

The FDA has approved a new DNA screening test that will permit detection of colon cancer and even precancerous polyps without requiring a colonoscopy. Far less unpleasant, as anyone who has undergone the prep for the procedure can testify, and a lot lower in cost. Some doctors argue that the test is less precise and informative than the full bore procedure, if you’ll excuse the expression. But since so many prospective patients refuse to have a colonoscopy screening, having heard the horror stories, something is surely better than nothing as a first step.

Finally, something straight out of science fiction – as if origami robots and outposts on comets weren’t enough. IBM has reported in a paper in Science that it has created the first neurosynaptic computer chip. That’s right, HAL lives. (Or perhaps, Heinlein fans, I should say Adam Selene). Until now, all computers have been based on so-called von Neumann architecture, which is digital and mathematical as opposed to the networked way in which the human brain operates.

TrueNorth, IBM’s name for the new chip, has been engineered “to understand its environment, handle ambiguity, and take action in real time and in context,” according to a cnet.com report by Daniel Terdiman. In short, such cognitive computing is intended to more nearly model the strategies of the human brain. As if that weren’t enough, TrueNorth is about the size of a postage stamp yet it includes 5.4 billion transistors, one million programmable neurons and 256 million synapses. And because it relies on brain-like connections rather than binary brute force it consumes a comparatively tiny amount of energy, about the same as a hearing aid.

An IBM spokesman suggested devices based on the chip could be used to issue tsunami alerts, monitor oil spills and enforce shipping lane routes. It would also be useful in allowing robotic systems to sense danger in advance rather than relying on painful trial and error. The spokesman did not mention defense applications, but since $53.5 million in funding for the research behind TrueNorth came from DARPA those may already be in the works.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, pioneered the world wide web. These days it is deeply invested in brain research, robotics, cyber security and such. It requires less imagination than the TrueNorth chip probably possesses to figure out military uses for such a chip or likely customers, with NSA at the top of the list. But Arpanet didn’t remain a military monopoly for long. Rather it became everybody’s internet. Neurocomputing chips are also likely to escape the barracks pretty quickly and change the world in weird, wonderful ways.

And that’s just the news of a few weeks, a reminder that all news is not bad news. Here’s another, during the sectarian strife of the Thirty Years War, with atrocities in Europe that would put ISIS to shame, here’s what was also happening.

Galileo and Kepler were laying the foundations for astrophysics, Harvey was discovering the circulation of blood, logarithms were being developed, the medicinal value of quinine was uncovered, Descartes was publishing as were Milton, Lope de Vega, Moliere, John Donne, John Bunyan. American colonies were being founded, the Taj Mahal was being built, universities were being created in Utrecht, Salzburg, Budapest and at Harvard in Massachusetts. The Academie Francaise was also begun and Rubens, Brueghel, Hals, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Lorraine, and Velasquez were painting.

So buck up. It is the season of Darkness, but also the season of Light. Even if primitives of the elder generation like myself are doomed to feel we are surrounded by magic or aliens from an advanced civilization.