Twitter, physics and sprinkling of the social sciences. The best post about twitter I’ve read.

(image from wikipedia. Keplers map.thanks!)

One Human’s Minutiae is Another’s Munificence

Please read all of Amy’s post, but here is an excerpt.

I laugh at the notion that technology alone will ever solve a problem; even if we lived in a world in which every person could contribute to one global database, these invisible barriers would still exist. The fact is I am regularly surprised by what I say has meaning to whom and while I myself don’t want to read every single thing a person does or thinks, I’d be willing to bet the farm that the compilation of this minutiae, coupled with other sources of data, would reveal patterns never obvious to us before and present answers to questions that have eluded humankind for ages. To do this however would require a lot of data, a lot of minutiae, all the minutiae you don’t want to hear. And yet the more information we make available, the greater our ability to understand our world and change it.

I believe with enough data, we can discover the truth in everything – and we will unveil an artisan’s masterfully ordered structure and achieve what Einstein simply did not have enough minutiae to achieve.

 

All this physics, philosophy, and maths on my blog lately may be sign of some mid life intellectual crisis. But I think not. Have no fear,  I will return to normal programming soon.

I found the post via Andrew MacAfee’s twitter.  Thanks.