Qatar is in the news this week. I don't know what to think, and I'm not out looking for someone to tell me what to think so that I can sputter and spew with 2 hours of study's worth of confidence. I'm already seeing that spit fly among the crowds I've fallen into. We're ever so pitiful.
I am reminded on this occasion that there once was a time when a friend of mine pointed me towards a website. For the life of me I cannot remember what that website was, but I think my reaction to it was one of genuine awe and appreciation. So my flattery became imitation on a smaller scale implemented into something I think was called Google Pages which later devolved into my T50. You see there once was this polymath scholar who put together a website which was a guide to everything in the world worth knowing. Imagine if you would, a kind of World Factbook put together by an individual capable of authoring such a thing, or at least editing one, then placed into public view. I found it remarkable, but alas that had to be over 15 years ago, and I'm capable of enormous feats of forgetfulness over such a period. The idea however, never did leave me, and now I'm thinking maybe I'm old enough to go find it again, or at least scale up my own pitiable little memos.
It would go something like this. Let us say we were to single-handedly build a university. We would then have to pick out several areas of knowledge and then discover who knows what. There would be some digging necessary but it wouldn't take entirely too long to find out who are the top brains in say, Bitcoin, or mountain climbing or translations of Sanskrit poetry. Surely such reference books can be found in a halfway decent library. The tiresome part would be keeping it all up to date. But in all of that is the tremendous burden of admitting to oneself how little of anything we know at all.
I found myself the other day waiting to be officially stood up by an old friend for lunch and watching 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' on the large screen over the bar. There came a point in the show when the host wanted to find someone in the audience to answer one four-way multiple choice question for $1000. The contestant was from Long Beach. The answer to the question was so obvious I wanted to throw a shoe at the television. He answered it properly of course, the lights and music came up and the crowd roared. Yay. So I was reminded yet again that there are people who will pay us to do all sorts of monkey tricks. There must also be people who would pay is to actually solve problems. Not us meaning you and I, but us meaning somebody out there somewhere. Employment is a bigger thing than I ever imagined, and so is arcane and necessary knowledge. In order to solve problems, such knowledge must be made available, and while I doubt that it can all be found in the interwebz, there must certainly be some pointers to it. Call it a Marauder's Map.
If I were to admit that I've got nothing better to do than work out my body, polish my teeth and save up for a flashy sports car, then I might take my T50 and expand it a bit, just for the sake of knowing what I don't actually know but might have one or two degrees of separation from if I weren't so lazy. I do possess some metadata management skills. As well, I have been pleased to read a bit of McMaster's recommendations and found a classic or two I didn't realize existed. So good reading is good for its own sake; I should use this blog to make a meta-library. That and nothing more. It's not about me, but just for the sake of the navigation.
I don't know how people manage to keep yelling about the 'mainstream media' this many years out. There are other sources. Let's go find them shall we?
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