Us as an authority figure, and improvement not doubt. How do you question yourself, anyway? A fun Friday quote:

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

I’d be Leary of that sentiment too.

And here I thought I had spotted a neologism. I read this piece in my reader this morning, and my first thought, uttered aloud, was, “But that’s not irony, Mer… oh, wait…”. In my cached copy, the word was spelled “ronically”. I thought, “Wow, that’s clever. Merlin just coined the term ‘ronically’ to mean ‘appropriately’.” I clicked on the post to leave a congratulatory comment, only to be disappointed to find it updated to ‘ironically’ on the site. Oh, well…

More on topic, I think we can apply other types of business strategy terminology to this phenomenon of ‘brain outsourcing’. This is seemingly akin to a “just-in-time” supply chain. While our forefathers had to build up warehouses of knowledge in order to fulfill unforeseen information requests that may come at any moment, we can now go to our information suppliers as needed to streamline our workflow. While this strategy may reduce costs in terms of time and storage space, it means we’re far less interesting guests at cocktail parties…

With 40 something roads with the word “peachtree” in the name, arbitrary one-way streets, and the 2nd worst traffic in the country, a wrong turn can cost you hours of time and years off of your life…

I blogged about this exact thing last night. It seems with the extension of internet access (see: iPhone), this seems even more possible. I noted that I thought it was along the same lines as BitTorrent, especially in a venue like wikipedia. Lots of little pieces of knowledge come together as one whole.

And, although Brooks doesn't mention it explicitly, this strikes me as just a hyper-method of transactive memory. I don't need to know which Halloween doesn't have Michael Meyers, because I know that Wikipedia or IMDB will have that knowledge for me.

(And the streets in downtown Austin are Texas rivers, in the proper east-west order. Unfortunately for me, I don't know what order Texas rivers come in.)

This isn't a new idea - take a look at Charlie Stross' online novel Accelerando at http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html (also available in print): the protagonist of the first section, Manfred, finds himself turning into the logical conclusion of this first step, until one day he's mugged and loses his interface to his external mind...

Just read the good news on DF — congratulations! Best wishes to you and your wife.

Yikes! There is a point where productivity cross over the great divide into mindlessness. What is the point of getting things done if you can't remember what you did or even if _you_ did it?

David's op-ed did a great job of proving Walter Kirn's theory of Attention-Deficit Recession in this month's Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking