Where The Grass Is Greener
I've been getting steadily more and more behind with my reading. Not books, but posts from blogs I follow, and other newsfeeds, in my RSS reader. The unread count currently stands at 17,564.
I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to click Mark All As Read, and start again with a clean slate. But I'm reluctant to do that because of the nagging doubt that I might miss a post of great importance. Not necessarily of great importance to everyone, but of great importance, or at least great significance, to me.
The thing is, it would take me getting on for five hours just to click through all those posts without even reading them (assuming 1 second for each). So it's pretty obvious I've got to dump at least some of them. But what method should I use?
I have my feeds organised into categories, such as Science, Tech, Viewpoints, and others, so I could just ditch the Science ones, for example, which would reduce the unread count by 3,879. Or the Tech ones, currently worth 1,176 points in this game. I suspect that after a certain amount of useless hand-wringing, I'll just go the Mark All As Read route. But it pains me, people. It pains me!
I blame Diaspora* for this state of affairs. It's only since I joined that upstart social network that I've found myself short on time to spend in my newsreader. But then, I've met some interesting folk there, and learnt some interesting stuff from them, not to mention the just having a bit of fun part.
It was via one of my contacts/friends on Diaspora* that I found this article about brain implants. The article itself is a bit scare-mongery, but it is based on some real research carried out at the University of Southern California. I doubt the 'memory implants' will be ready in time for me to deal with my reading backlog, but the idea of being able to insert pre-made memories does raise some interesting possibilities for dealing with this 'ere information overload situation.
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I went for a walk earlier and took this photo of some bamboo. I think they are beautiful, and it adds to my pleasure that I know they are part of the grass family, and are not actually trees. I didn't always know that, I learnt it along the way. If that information, plus the rest of the 'encyclopedia' could be plugged directly into our brains, what a different world it would be. But would the grass really be greener? Or just the colour of the Matrix?
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