Nicholas Carr’s column Is Google Making Us Stupid? in The Atlantic has opened a wonderful disputation that is drawing in great minds from all over the Web. Edge has the blow by blow account of the academic throw-down debate, which centers on the question of how the Internet is affecting the way we think.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

As a result, Carr and his peers describe having difficulty reading long articles or books and immersing themselves in complex subjects. It’s a problem I experience regularly when there are a 1,000 articles queued in my RSS feed. Carr uses Tolstoy’s epically boring masterpiece War and Peace and the number of people who still read this book as an admittedly unscientific measure of the effect the Information Age has on our ability to dedicate the concentration on a single work and follow through on it.

A lot of commenters got hung up on the value of reading War and Peace in and of itself. Even Clay Shirky, in arguing that the book is boring and it’s fine that’s nobody wants to read it, obtusely misses the point in order to talk past Carr and go off on his own personal tirade against traditionalism.

People reading War and Peace isn’t what’s at stake here, deep immersion in subject matter is what Carr worries about our culture losing. It’s the threat that people will find themselves incapable of engaging any thoroughly in-depth and expansive topic that cannot be explained in bit-sized portions. Replace War and Peace with Quantum Physics, and the debate point still stands. Does the Information Age scatterbrain us so much that we have lost the concentration required to learn Quantum Physics?

W. Daniel Hillis makes an extremely important point here that helps us keep perspective on the debate, which is to consider the nature of the medium we are discussing:

A better argument might be that we have easier control over the pace and order of book than a video. That is true, but it points about the advantages of other media, such as linked interactive text, over books. Straight lines of thought and presentation can be a useful tool, but they are a constraint, not a unique advantage.

With the devaluation of the book, we are only losing one kind of thought-process, directed linear thought. When I study Quantum Physics in a book, an author controls my attention, directing me through the subject matter along a path they believe best suits understanding for their audience. When I study Quantum Physics online, I create my own path through the subject matter, following hyperlinks to additional background information and clarification as I, the individual, need them.

With web surfing, I am customizing my learning according to my own needs, with books, I am benefiting from the wisdom of someone who has all ready delved deeply into the subject. Both methods of learning are important, and, to quibble with Hillis, both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage of the book is it’s linear-learning constraint, and David Brin raises the chief disadvantage to online learning:

Instead of fretting about specialists “knowing more and more about less and less,” today’s info-glut has had an inverse effect—to spread peoples’ attention so widely that they—in effect—know just a little about a vast range of topics. No longer do we fear “narrowmindedness” as much as “shallowmindedness.”

An example of “narrowmindedness” is a dittohead that consumes eight-plus hours of conservative talk radio a day, or any ideogogue who’s aversion behavior prevents their exposure to a variety of perspectives and opinions. I have faith that the overwhelming majority of people are not narrowminded in general; however, I think that same majority, myself included, is probably overwhelmingly shallowminded.

Shallowmindedness is what gives many of us something to talk about. We get it from magazines, television, movies, and chain e-mails. It’s a way of knowing what everyone else knows, and it’s not synonymous with a lack of intelligence.

On the contrary, this whole debate resembles one in science about whether it is better to be a hedgehog or a fox scientist. Scientists who are foxes dart from topic to topic, absorbing a wide variety of facts, which may or may not prove fruitful on cross-pollination. Hedgehog scientists hunker down in one subject and become and expert in it.

I suppose on the Internet, foxes like me post the daily links to all sorts of stuff to chat about around the water-cooler at work, but it’s the hedgehogs who make those links possible, and without them, the Internet would be a much less interesting place.

Just some food for thought.

I came across the blogpost Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks recently, which argues that programming makes for a terrible long-term career choice because the languages and technologies are always changing:

Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. It’s temporary because the powers that be keep changing the languages and tools that programmers need to do their jobs. In nearly all other professions, knowledge capital increases as you grow older because you keep learning more about your field. But in computer programming, the old knowledge becomes completely obsolete and useless. No one cares if you know how to program in COBOL for example. It’s completely useless knowledge.

The technologies are all new and different every five years; therefore, anything you learn today will be “completely useless” before you know it. It sounds like common sense, but is this really the case?

My experience is that it is not. Fresh out of college I learned Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the basic script that tells your browser how a web page should look. Then I learned JavaScript, code to make my HTML pages more dynamic. Then I learned Edify, a visual interface tool that allowed me to draw programs in flowcharts (Wish I had a screenshot of the interface. People always thought I was playing videogames when I was programming). I was able to port this foundation in programming to a job writing Active Server Pages (ASP), using VBScript. With a familiarization of data arrays, I Worked my way into database development and SQL scripting.

OmniVox telephony application (A Close Approximation to What Edify Looked Like)

What kicked off this 10-year journey of exploration? Running a BBS on my Commodore 128 as a kid.

I work with people who have decades of programming experience, who spent years writing COBOL on mainframes. Far from obsolete, these developers come up with some of the most ingenious programming solutions I’ve ever seen in modern technologies. That’s because some of them have 40 years experience in programming, and can tell you why the system works the way it does.

In 10 years of working as an IT professional, I’ve learned that if you know ASP, you know PHP. If you know SQL Server, then you know Oracle. If you can make the website work in one web browser, you can make it work in all of them.

The reason programmers only get better with age is because, while the syntax for the latest programming language might be new, the logic and methodologies underlying it is the same. If/Then’s, arrays, loops, and the principles of good programming don’t change; they become more refined with time.

Good programmers refine themselves with them.

Note: Most employers don’t see it this way. Many will go with the 22-year-old developer over the one with 20 years experience because employers look for experience in specific technologies, failing to understand the common principles underlying them all.

Most employers are dumbasses, but you all ready knew that.

President Bush knows why oil prices are high when he tells us, “The only thing standing now between the American people and these vast oil resources is the United States Congress,” but his actions to lift oil-drilling bans from our nature preserves and off America’s coasts are just a drop in the bucket of what he could be doing to ease oil prices for suffering Americans.

The true future of American Oil is all around us:

The REAL Untapped Oil Supply Credit: K.E.B Photography

What those environmentalists don’t want the American people to know is that oil is made of plants. It’s true! It’s science! All the oil we burn in our cars is the natural, organic product of plants that have been squished up and converted into combustible hydrocarbons!

America needs to start proactively helping this process along by burying our national forests underground so they can begin the natural, organic conversion process. (Keep stressing those words “natural” and “organic.” Environmentalists will eat it up.) The effort of burying our country’s forests will not only create thousands of new jobs, but we can also pave over the buried forests and put Wal-Marts on top of them!

Trees are a total waste of space anyways. They just sit there, doing nothing, and serving no purpose except for sissy-prissy liberals to write poems about. We need to start planting Capitalism!

Critics will argue that it will take 100 Million Years for nature to convert our nation’s forests to crude oil, but if we had started proactively burying our forests 100 million years ago we wouldn’t be in this mess today! You ever think about that, you stupid environmentalist jerks???

Burying our Nation’s forests is just the first step Bush can take to stop capitulating to those capitalism-hating, nature-worshipping hippies and man-up to the real solutions to America’s oil-supply problems. Rush Limbaugh admires Chinese gas subsidies, but even having the Federal Government buy our gasoline for us doesn’t go far enough (however crucial it is to the effort of wheel-barrowing Limbaugh’s lard-butt around in a humvee).

Bush should remove the bans on selling our children into indentured servitude, so we can turn them over to the Oil Industry. He should replace Congress with ExxonMobile stockholders, who can then replace him with a CEO in turn. As Patrick Henry will proclaim, once the Oil Companies get to rewrite the history books, “Give me convenience or give me death.¹”

¹ From the title of a Dead Kennedys album.

“Heya!” a pipsqueak of a girl with a pair of cheap, paper-mache wings strapped to her back greeted the small gaggle of stunned onlookers. “Welcome to Heaven! I’m you’re tour guide!”

A series of “Oh’s” and “Ah’s” wafted from the group, all of whom were looking around the endless, cloud-filled landscape appreciatively.

“Last thing I remember,” an overweight gentleman with a bushy white mustache muttered aloud, “I was trying to make that 18th hole before a thunderstorm rained out the golf course. What happened to me? What about my wife and children?”

“Yeah, um, I got no idea,” the tour guide popped her gum. “That was, like, ten thousand years ago. You guys were all totally dead between then and now. We’ve got a social networking system, like you had on your Wild Wild Web, where you’ll be able to register and find all your loved ones. It’s really fab.”

“What about my cat, Mr. Snugglekins?” a little girl in pajamas asked. “Will he come to heaven too?”

“Pets are a special case,” a transparent window materialized before the tour guide, and her lips moved silently as she read to herself from it. “Pets are resurrected on a case by case… Blah blah blah… Navigate to… click on the Suggest a Pet link… Okay!” she snapped her fingers. “You can put a request in with the administrators. All they need is your four-dimensional location in the space-time continuum. You know, when and where you owned Mr. kitty, and they’ll find him.”

The little girl was frowning skeptically at the tour guide.

“That reminds me!” the tour guide took the wad of gum from her mouth and stuck it to one of her wings. “If any of you can remember homeless people, or people who didn’t have any friends, if you could take some time to describe them to our caseworkers, we’d really appreciate it. We’re missing a lot of people here.”

“I don’t understand,” a little old lady spoke up then. “Aren’t you all-seeing and all-knowing? How can you lose people?”

“It’s called chaos theory,” the tour guide was twirling her curly blonde hair with one finger now, “The universe and time are really really big. We can’t keep track of everything in it.”

“Would you mind behaving a little more professionally young lady?” a priggish woman at the front of the group piped up. “For most of us, this resurrection is a very sacred experience.”

The girl rolled her eyes, “Uh huh. Look lady, there was, like, billions of people alive on Earth when you were alive. Multiply that by, like, thousands of years, and that’s… like… Um… a lot of people, okay? … What makes you special?

“I was a devoted member of my church,” the woman replied, holding her head up stiffly, “I attended every Sunday and donated thousands of dollars to the ministry over my lifetime.”

“Huh,” the tour guide quipped, obviously unimpressed, “Well this is Science Heaven, okay? Do you remember being in some Christian Heaven before you arrived here?”

“Well, I… No.”

“Do you want us to send you back there?”

The woman appeared ready to retort defiantly, but then caught herself, looking down sullenly, “No. Thank you.”

“Okay then!” The tour guide swiveled around and began leading the group into eternity, “We have another group coming through in just a moment, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll present to you all the first day of the rest of your afterlife!”

LED Bookmark Light

For the fourth of July, I purchased 600 LEDs and 600 lithium batteries for the Port Discover Science Center to give out before the Elizabeth City fireworks display. Because I was afraid of the LED-throwies presenting a choking hazard, I decided to tape them to the top of bookmarks advertising the science center and the environmental benefits of LED lighting.

The Bookmarks had facts such as:

• Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) use only 15-percent as much energy as incandescent light bulbs and 50-percent as much energy as compact fluorescents.
• LEDs last for an average of 60,000 hours. Even if you left your lights on for half of every day, they would still last over 25 years, or longer than most people own their homes!
• The Department of Energy has estimated that LEDs could reduce national energy consumption for lighting by 29% by 2025. That would save U.S. households $125 billion on their electric bills.
• You can fold this bookmark over and use it as a book light!You can replace the lithium battery and reuse the LED again and again.

Choosing LED Colors

A variety of LED colors were provided and the bookmarks were printed on a variety of colored cardstock. We let the kids choose their own colors, and helped them put the bookmark lights together, explaining electrons and electricity as we did so. By hole punching the bookmarks with the battery exposed and LED contact left free, kids could turn them on by squeezing.

I found earlier that an LED will burn brightly for over two weeks continuously on one lithium battery. The kids DIY project ended up being quite a hit, and many people were surprised we were giving them away for free.

A baby praying mantis dropped by to see what we were up to. It was camera-shy, so here’s the best shot I could get. : )

Baby Praying Mantis Visitor

You can check out the flickr set here.