I’m troubled by not only how much I don’t know, which is legion, but how much that I don’t know that I don’t know. There’s so much out there that I’m not even aware of most of my ignorance; it’s as dark matter, lurking unseen and unknown.

Today, I stumbled on an entire scientific field that I wasn’t even aware existed: intellectual history, which is “the study of intellectuals, ideas, and intellectual patterns over time.” I must admit that I’m not much for history, but this seems very useful, and I’d love to get my hands on a decent textbook covering the “greatest hits” of ideas. Alas, I’ve as of yet been unable to track down quite what I’m after, but this looks close.

The annals of history are strewn with smallpox-infested corpses. The idealist thinks, “Ah, the past. What a barbaric era!” The cynic thinks, “Open your eyes. We have traded smallpox for the horrors of HIV/AIDs.”

To which we respond, as always, show me the numbers: smallpox killed an estimated one-third to one-half a billion people, while AIDs has killed 30 million people, a tenth as many. Terrible-future proponents would be better off scaring children with scenarios where tobacco use doesn’t peak and fall off in the developing world (India, China, and others) like it has in the USA, in which case we could see staggering death tolls, with one WHO report projecting as many as a billion tobacco-related deaths by the end of the century.

Further Reading

• If you find this kind of reasoning compelling, you’ll probably enjoy Peter Singer’s talk here.
• If you actually want to do something about it, check out GiveWell.
• In the vein of preventing a terrible future, Nick Bostrom has a neat paper here.

The glazed donut is the noblest of all donuts. It’s not a loud, flashy donut. It doesn’t seduce coffeehouse denizens with sprinkles or jelly filling. It’s an honest, functional donut. While all donuts may represent some excess, the glazed donut does not smack of the same gluttony as more lavish donuts.

The glazed donut is to donuts as black coffee is to coffee. It’s a man’s donut: a plain, frill-free donut. It’s a white t-shirt, not a lacy dress.

• The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge goes unclaimed.
• The price of an ounce of marijuana in Colorado drops to under 150, half of what it’s going for today.
• The twin prime conjecture is proven.
• First mainframes, then desktops, then laptops, cell phones, tablets. This year we will see an influx of wearable computing devices.
• Rights for gays continue to improve with at least one more state legalizing same sex marriage.
• Pat Quinn wins the 2014 Illinois gubernatorial election.

I read an interesting interview with Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience, this morning. The article was pretty good, but that’s not what I want to talk about. This is what I want to talk about:

“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love
these things (smartphones), they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly
passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we
also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”

This makes me sad because I feel like I’m supposed to love my smartphone, and I don’t.

See, I’m a geek — or a nerd or a technologist or what-have-you — and my life is fundamentally centered around interactions with computers, but here’s the thing: I don’t really a give a shit about my smartphone. My relationship with my smartphone is just plain shallow, decidedly so when compared with how I feel about my desktop or MacBook.

Actually, you know what, I hate my smartphone.

Before you start foaming at the mouth, gentle reader, my smartphone is running Android and not iOS, but — before owning an Atrix — I owned an iPhone 3G, and I hated that, too. This isn’t about iOS vs Android. I hate them both.

Now, I’m not saying that my smartphone isn’t useful. It is. My computer, though, isn’t just useful. It changes the way I interact with everything. If I felt the same way about my computer as I do about my Android device, I would be thinking “well, at least I don’t have to use the phonebook to look this up.”

I love computers, but hate my smartphone.

It’s not that I don’t know how to use my smartphone. It’s true that I don’t know the full potential of the device: all the touch gestures, useful applications, power user stuff, but, really, what is there to it? You can call people, browse the web, take photos, send text messages, and play Angry Birds.

The block that I have is: I can’t do anything useful with a smartphone! I can’t do work with it. Text input is just a huge pain and the screen is too small to do any useful reading. It’s portable, sure, but I’d always rather use a PC or laptop than a smartphone, if given the option.

When I’m sitting on the couch, I don’t pull out my smartphone. I open up my MacBook. When I want to browse the web, I use my MacBook. If I’m going to do some writing, like this post, I don’t use my smartphone, I use my MacBook. When coding or listening to music, I use my desktop.

I do use my smartphone to browse the web, on occasion, so there’s that, but it’s whenever I don’t have my laptop or desktop handy. I only interact with one site at a time, and it’s just not very pleasant. It feels very limited, not at all empowering.

The rest of the ways that I interact with my smartphone, they’re all social and, as an introvert, it just doesn’t hold a whole lot of appeal for me. My text messaging skill and finesse, especially when compared to my typing ability, it’s pathetic. I hate trying to input text on the device, especially complex passwords: what a pain!

The least excusable failing of Android and iOS, I’ve realized while writing this, is that I can’t move from what I’m working on with my MacBook or desktop and then to my smartphone. That would be great, even if the transition between form factors would maybe be a little awkward. Imagine if you could just resume your browsing session on your laptop or desktop from your phone.

After all, the desktop and laptop markets, they’re going to go the way of the workstation (and the dodo). They might remain in certain niches but, fundamentally, those markets are going to be disrupted by more portable options. The desktop market is already disappearing, cannibalized by laptops. That’s why IBM got out of the PC market.

We’re going to keep the laptop form factor for a while, I believe, but I think that they’ll just be shells that you plug your smartphone into. The keyboard as input is still the best tool for the job, thus far, and there will always be a market for devices with screens larger than 4.2″, so it doesn’t make sense for that form factor to disappear.

That’s where Android and iOS should be headed: integration with the OS, empowering users, providing the means to create meaningful works on these devices. Computing isn’t just consuming media and talking with your friends!

I have this theory: inside of every person there is a blogger trying to get out. Everybody has the potential to maintain a blog with, at the very least, weekly updates. I do not care how busy you are. There’s no excuse not to do it.

The benefits of blogging are many.

Blogging facilitates powerful introspection.

In my years of blogging, I have found that writing in general, and blogging specifically, are great ways to discover truths about yourself. When you sit down and distill your thoughts into the written word, you are forced to cut out all of the junk.

Now, I don’t know about everybody, but I naturally tend towards introspection and analysis, so when I start distilling my thoughts into a blog post, I get curious. I start asking myself: “Why is it that you think that? Is this thought part of a pattern? Does your personality influence this thought or does this thought influence your personality?” Then, I start to analyze the analysis, and so on. It’s turtles all the way down.

What I’m getting at is: when you blog, you’re presented with a great opportunity to learn about yourself, and knowing about yourself is a very good thing because you will a) become aware of your strengths and weaknesses and with this awareness you will become resilient to attempts by people to exploit your weakness and you will gain the ability to exploit your strengths, and b) you will be able to make future decisions faster and with more confidence since you will be aware of why you have come to such a conclusion.

Blogging crystallizes thoughts and thought processes.

When you set about writing a blog article, your ideas and feelings about the topic in question may not be clearly defined. By the time you have finished your blog post, your thoughts and thought processes will have become clearly defined, crystallized. This is a necessary byproduct of writing about your ideas.

When you set about communicating an idea, in our case through writing, you must do so with a certain level of clarity — otherwise, no one will be able to understand your ideas. Personally, I always try to present an idea as clearly as possible by making my writing, first and foremost, unambiguous and, also, as simple as possible. This maximizes communicability: the effectiveness of getting your idea across.

Since you are forced to present your ideas with clarity, you must refine them. You have to sit and think “how would I express this idea in words?” Through this refinement, your ideas become concrete, crystallized and you gain something important: understanding.

Blogging improves your ability to express yourself.

Blogging is a form of communication and the benefits of being able to effectively communicate should be self-evident. Think about it. What is society based on, if not communication? Imagine living without the ability to effectively express your ideas and emotions. Want to tell that special someone how you feel? I hope you’re able to communicate effectively or it will come out all wrong.

Communication and expression are literally fundamental to every aspect of being human. There are few, if any, skills more valuable than effective communication. Think of all the great men throughout history and consider where they would be without the ability to effectively communicate. Would we even know Einstein’s name if he hadn’t been able to communicate so effectively, to explain mass-energy equivalence in such a way that even a layman can grasp the power of the idea?

When you blog, you are honing your ability to express yourself. You’re practicing. How effectively you manage to communicate in your blog, that’s not super important, unless you plan on becoming mega-popular, but when you’re interviewing for that job you really want, I’ll bet you’ll be glad that you’ve been practicing expressing yourself effectively.

People will enjoy your creation.

It took me a long time to realize this, but people enjoy reading blogs, even blogs about nothing. That’s why blogs are so popular. When you write a blog post, you’re creating something of value, something that people enjoy. That’s really powerful! It’s a good thing to think about now and again. It will help keep you motivated.

Whatever you write, I’m sure people will find it entertaining or informative. When I was 12, I kept a blog just about my daily life and people loved it. They just ate it up. A 12 year-old kid blogging about his day, and they loved it!

Just think about it: you have the power to create something that other people will enjoy.