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15 February 2006
It's really irritating to not know stuff. There's just too much stuff I don't know.
Oh, the computer one is easy. Spend between $2000 and $2500 at Dell, and keep the machine for 4-5 years. Amortized cost is $500/yr, and the machine will only start to dhow its age, vis-a-vis new software in the third to fifth years.
You could look at it the other way around; there's still stuff left for you to learn.
Me, I notice that I'm starting to just not care about, well, stuff. But that's probably because of my current situation which will all be over in about a month - I'm sure my inquisitiveness will return.
related sadness: when you do the calculations about how much is left to us in life, at a maximum, and just realize there are so many books you'll never read, albums you'll never hear, and places you'll never travel to because of sheer lack of time. Learning stuff is also like that. There will be only so much you can accomplish.
This is why I choose to remain ignorant about wine. I would rather know nothing beyond "I like red" than feel bad that whatever pathetic amount of knowledge I could build in the limited time I could devote to it.
I am constantly frustrated by this too, ortho. I know a lot of things - more than your average guy who doesn't want to know much, I dare say - but I feel like I'm always butting up against my own ignorance, and, worse, my own unconscious prejudices and wrong assumptions.
i'm reading this now--The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller , and very much relate to the guy it's about--he's cobbled together a working view, and never mind if it doesn't make sense, as long as it works. (he of course tho, was executed after an inquisition)
Of course, i try to travel as much as i can, and read all the time, but many many things are just beyond me--it's all fun to learn about tho.
But of course you all just make things up as you go along? Knowing things is a very 20th century reductionist military-industrial complex concept. I, for one, am irritated that I have to keep explaining that rotting meat generates maggots and that gravity is the result of sentient dirt that hates floating.
silly, gravity is the result of all the really big people on the planet, and their farting too much. ; >
you know what i really wonder tho--there are map/globe things that show that there are places on earth with more gravity than others--is life worse there for people or better?
but has it affected things? is a place like the Middle East, which has seen almost continual strife since recorded history a place of denser gravity? or of the opposite?
have breakthroughs in various fields tended to happen in lighter places or heavier? have wars? have long stretches of peace? have healthier populations? etc?
we're very much creatures of our environments, and there are places with lots of energy and buzz (NYC, Bombay, etc), and places that are sleepy and quieter, even when geography matches (Pittsburgh, or Amsterdam, etc).
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
