Apr

15

Quotes of the moment

April 15, 2007 |

This came up on my Google Quotes today:

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.” - Samuel Johnson

I’ve been thinking lately about the internet, and all the little idiosyncrasies of psychology and attitude that make up the gap between those who use it and those who don’t. I almost typed “generation gap” in there, but that’s not exactly true. Lots of people who have been in my programming courses so far have been barely 10 years younger than my grandparents (mostly men, too, but that’s another post). From there, the whole spectrum of ages is involved, from 50-60somethings to people, like me, in our early-mid 20’s. The difference I’m talking about isn’t really between me and the 65-year-old guy who helped make computer programs work before C++ had even been developed. The difference is between me and my mother, over a decade younger, who can’t really check her email without being walked through the steps of logging on and typing out–letter by painstaking letter–the URL for Gmail.com.

We think about knowledge in different ways. When you rely on books and magazines, and even newscasts and radio interviews, to help you understand a subject, you’ll usually get a fair amount of informational breadth, whether you want it or not. On the internet, for the most part, that call is up to you. You can spend months looking through every available resource, every hobbyist’s webpage and academic’s dissertation, wikipedia and university department sites. Or you can plug a few carefully thought-out terms into your search engine of choice to find the first three sentences relevant to your immediate interest, and stop there. Does the price we pay for so much expanded opportunity and information come out of our attention span and ability to sift through and synthesize it all?As the first to be raised with the internet always on hand, my generation and the one right after us will probably have to answer that question. It’ll be interesting to see how many truly learned scholars of any subject we produce, or whether we’ll have a whole chaotic mess of surface-Renaissance men and women, who can shoot off factoids and statistics on an amazing range of subjects but haven’t had any time to go in and figure out what those facts and numbers mean.In any case, enough of that. My other memorable Google quote this morning was:

“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
- Joseph Heller

That, I think, is one to keep in the front of the brain.

In real life news, several people I know are supposed to be flying today. I suspect that they aren’t. However, I also suspect that they have the common sense to sort it out themselves. It’s a crazy storm, sure, but at the end of the day it’s just the weather.

As far as things I am worried about, I woke up this morning with the same headache that followed me to sleep last night. It wasn’t a migraine then, but it seems to be thinking about turning into one now. I’ve got lots and lots of reasons to be suspicious of this. But the thing about headaches is that they make it very hard to focus on anything. So I’ll just be grumpy and groggy for a while longer and hope it goes away.

After a week or so of research, making phone calls and pestering help lines, I’m down to two options for my new bank. I’m hoping to use today to do a little more in-depth research and sort them out, so I can go ahead and change over on Monday or Tuesday this week. Wish me luck.


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