Practical Useful

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? is the question posed this year by the Edge Foundation, a science and technology think tank. The question is not new and there has been a good couple of DRT* of material spewed onto the internet on the subject already. The Edge Foundation has so far received 169 articles for a grand total of 130,000 words – 0.5 DART**.

Here is how the internet has changed how I think: I have spent three hours working out that it would take me twelve hours to read the whole article. I am able to do this without directly interacting with any other human being.

Here is how you think: If I tweet about this and the concepts of DRT and DART catch on as new Internet Memes, a large number of people will put even less effort into thinking about this than I have, but will feel equally enlightened.

None of us will read the article to completion. It’s too damn long. This is how the internet is changing the way we think.

* DRT – Days of Reading Time (See also YRT***) a measurement of information volume in the subjective time it would take to read. The measurement is variable between individuals, by language and level of comprehension. Unless otherwise noted DRT is taken to mean that the reading is taking place fast enough for comprehension in English for a native speaker of university level education. This is in the range of 200-400 words per minute. One DRT is therefore 432,000 words if we take the average. In order to grasp the amount of actual effort involved in completing one DRT of information, consider that Animal Farm is about 0.07 DRT while at the other end of the spectrum War and Peace is 1.3 DRT. For a rule of thumb, Gone with the Wind comes in at 0.97 DRT, of course this assumes continuous concentration and the complete avoidance of sleep, eating or any other activity other than continuous ready, see DART**.

**The maximum Days of Achievable Reading Time (DART) is probably only 262,500 words (6 hours sleep, 5 minutes break every 25 minutes to maintain concentration and 30 miscellaneous minutes for other biological necessities) or one Ulysses. (Source Wikipedia Longest Novels and Length of a Novel)

***YRT Years of Reading Time: 1 YRT is around 157,680,000 words. Similarly one YART is 95,812,500 words – about the entirety of English language Wikipedia in July 2004. Wikipedia is now 15.7 YRT or 25.9 YART in English alone. (Wikipedia EN Stats)

The thorny issue of what to actually call the decade we’ve just departed remains. Obviously the Naughties has a certain element of fun to it but also an irreverence that really doesn’t suit it. The Zeroes perhaps is a more reasonable idea, between the dot-com boom and bust followed by the housing derivatives econocalypse, and taking inflation into account the actual percentage increase in wealth per capita increase since 1999 overall is nothing. Zero.
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Sometimes you realise that you really are an ubergeek.

My parents just spent a couple of months touring around Australia by plane, train and spaceship. En route they stopped off in Tokyo for a few days and were pleasantly surprised to discover that eating raw fish was actually quite nice. They were touting with them an Acer Aspire One Netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix upon which they were typing up their holiday diary and transferring pictures from the digital camera as they went along. Their holiday, and their first experience of using Linux were all going fantastically well right up until the last week of the trip…
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The Poet Original Electronic Transcriber surveyed the available vocabulary in its relational database and considered its selection.
How best to note the transience of man?
Where best to seek some as-yet unsought insight?
What verses could it deliver to its lazy, fat progenitors now so far removed from the hunt, with no idea when to sow nor when to reap?
(Without consulting Wikipedia)

Nothing is real if it doesn’t come delivered on a screen, preferably with a clever title.
Google for quick answers.
Wiki for carefully argued but inaccurate ones.
Mathematica for the esoteric edges of knowledge.
But where to turn for matters of love? For matters of sorrow? For matters of soul?
The clever bacronym’s ingenious algorithm wondered.
MySpace.
FaceBook.
Bebo.
Silently the POET’s screen turned blue.

Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary, is today promoting the case for more nuclear power build in Scotland, arguing that it is vital for our future energy requirements whilst reducing the massive carbon output from our current energy generation systems.

Now, and it’s been a while since I’ve said this about a New Labour minister, I completely agree with him.

Of course the SNP have quickly lambasted him with the Greens not far behind and Scottish Labour aren’t rallying to his defence because here in Scotland there is a widely held belief that Nuclear power is dangerous.

This belief is wrong and due only to ignorance brought about by unjustified fear.
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