Knowledge

Information is valuable. It's even more valuable when shared.

All too often the wrong decisions are made because of a lack information or the information at hand is inaccurate. I find myself searching for information quite often whether it's because I want to buy the right product, satisfy my curiosity, or to decide what path to go down at one of life's crossroads. I know that in 99.999% of cases, someone has already asked the questions I'm trying to answer. If only I could have access to their solution! A long time ago before paper and written language was invented, knowledge was passed on generation to generation through spoken language. What a concept! Imagine if every generation had to start at square one, conceptualize and invent their own tools from scratch and make all the same mistakes of their ancestors!

Next came one of the greatest human inventions ever - written language. The sum of all human knowledge from everyday stuff to more obscure information could be bound an stored on a library shelf and accessed by anybody who could read. A single person could amass an entire lifetime of information from reading other people's works and doing her own research and sum it all up in a single volume to be read by millions of people in the present and forever into the future. A giant leap in the rate of technological advancements corresponded to the this single event even though people probably hardly noticed.

We've now taken the next quantum leap of information sharing with the internet. In less than a minute, you can do a search from your living room to find out what the hottest pepper in the world is or have access to a public database of DNA sequence maps of complete chromosomes or genomes of over 4600 species (including human) and counting. What we choose to to with all this information at our fingertips now will be forever recorded in history books. We can do good with it, do evil with it, or just remain ignorant and let things happen around us.

When I look around at what some people or governments are doing, I jump to the conclusion that they HAVE to be misinformed. Otherwise why on earth would they be doing what they're doing? Or perhaps they have some information that I don't! Thus far in my short life I've read a lot, traveled a lot and asked many questions. With this blog, I hope to disseminate valuable information filtered through an objective non-biased view and make it available to others to use in hopefully good ways. There's been many times where I've been searching for how to do something for hours, and I came across someone's blog to find the exact solution I was looking for. I hope that I can return the favor to other people with this blog and also learn more myself from them!

Here's a link to a Will Smith speech that just popped in my head regarding reading.