Posted by Mark H. on February 9, 2005, at 19:27:01
In reply to Picture a beebee in a boxcar..., posted by 64bowtie on February 4, 2005, at 9:47:29
Hi Rod,
I was trying to be funny in my post above, but I don't think I succeeded.
Here's a quote from Buckminster Fuller that I like:
"Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."
Especially with the Internet, we have almost unimaginable access to information these days, yet we still are able to absorb information at the same rate we did 200 years ago. How on earth do we decide what to let in?
I recall Carl Sagan opening one of his shows by speculating how many books a person could reasonably read in an average adult lifetime. Perhaps one a week? If so, he said, a person might read 3,000 books in his/her lifetime, "or about 1/10th of 1 percent of the books on this floor of the New York Public Library" where he was standing.
I was working in a bookstore at the time, and I realized with a shock that the notion of anyone being "well read" was intellectual vanity, at best a very relative and selective concept.
So I think we are indeed faced with a "boxcar full of beebees" when it comes to information today, and perhaps the next advances in education will be in the areas of self-management involved with the filtering and selection of knowledge bases.
Mark H.
poster:Mark H.
thread:453054
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050205/msgs/455613.html