A Balance, Redefined

How so?

Just a bad day.

It should be qualified that technology has allowed us to do a number of great things. However, I also believe it has caused a number of problems.

Examples that sparked this e-mail. I have robots to help in a couple of my experiments. However, I had stuff not work on Friday and there was no way to track down what went wrong. Also, 15 years ago scientists actually read papers. And built off of each others work. Now however there are 100s if not 1000s of papers published each day. It has been physically impossible to keep up with all the work being done due to the speed at which things can be uploaded etc and I believe that if everyone stopped working today and just tried to understand the terabytes of knowledge that are out there we could be so much more efficient. I also believe this applies to a number of other fields. People seem to do do do and I think that is directly related to being able to keep moving without having the pause that the pre-computer era had built in. So that is a small and probably incoherent portion of the work related issues. Then come the social issues and the fact that many of the youth cannot have relationships. Everything is constant nonsense. The number of people I see out at a restaurant just on their phones texting away instead of talking to the people that are sitting across from them. This extends to the 100s of hours I wasted in my youth playing video games that has converted to 1000s of hours in today's kids and now adults. However, as is stated above and can instantly throw this rant up for 1000s to potentially see and not have the one on one discussion. Don't get me wrong I do believe that this is tons of pros to technology but I think a focus should also be spent on way America is so fat now and has so much divorce etc. Is it just a coincidence that it coincides with the development of TV then computers and now cell phones?

Don't forget ADHD, when you think about the vast amounts of "stuff" that bombard come at you every minute (check out CNN - you have the commentator, the screen below and then the little window all at one time) it is no wonder that people are antsy and overwhelmed.

That is one of the many reasons I like to run, and maybe one of the reasons I keep it really simple (no garmen and often no watch) ...

But, I hear you Adam. And once you jump on the "wheel" it is hard to get off ;-)

Hi Bonnie, It is so fitting that yesterday I came across this article in The Economist. In fact it was a whole section. Data, Data everywhere. It is just amazing how much "stuff" is out there and how quickly it is getting so much worse. They are predicting that there will be 1.2 Zettabytes (2^70) of information out there this year. Impossible for me to imagine. And that for example, from China the number of publications in peer reviewed scientific journals has increased 14-fold since 1990. Good luck to us all...