Thinking of the Past

Recently I've been watching TTC video lectures during my lunch time. I figgure I got an hour where I am here and on the computer I might as well learn something. It is actually a really nice way to spend my time. The lectures themselves are 30 minutes which means I have the remainder of my lunch to do pretty much whatever I want to. Today I was gonna build a Stark deck so I can have more than one thing to loose with in A GAME OF THRONES! but I deiced instead to write here.

Yesterday after my lecture ended I was stuck with a rather perculiar memory. It was shortly after Magic the Gathering got translated into a bunch of different languages and for some reason I ended up with a bunch of cards I couldn't read. This is also long before the magic card viewer so I was trying to figgure out what this snazzy looking artefact did. The card was written in German, a language I don't know, but my Step mom did know! So I did the logical thing and I asked her. I didn't really think she'd be able to translate it but it would be nice if she could. She couldn't. She spent all of 2 minutes looking at the card before giving up and moving on. This is something that I thought was so weird. It is also weird that it popped into my head right now. I generally make an effort to learn things or rather to never stop learning things. I don't do it as often as I could and I don't fill my every waking moment with relentless education but I definitly don't ever want to get to a point where when I am presented with a problem that is tangental to my interests that I go, "nope to hard can't help". Even with math, I wish I could be better at it but I simply am not and that disapoints me.

I think it is healthy to have a natural curiostiy around the world and in general I find that most people do have it. But for whatever reason it isn't something a lot of people spend a lot of their free time investing in. The other week at anime club I was watching a graduate level linguistics lecture on youtube while I was eating dinner and I had multiple people come in an join me. There are times where people will ask me questions at work and I will end up leading dicussions on history or philosphy. They always seem to start small but one time in paticular I had just about everyone working listening to me.

Self education is such a critical thing and thanks to the internet we have the largest depository of human knowlage ever assembled and with smart phone just about all of it is accessable from anywhere at any time. And yet...I dunno it isn't that they are rapidly becomeing more ignorant. People were always like that. It isn't that people aren't regressing (ie the anti inoculation people) those sorts of people always excisted too. It is the non extremeist people. It is like people cross this sort of line and once that happens they are done learning anything new and they are free to live their lives. Not only is this wrong but it is unhealthy. The brain needs to be kept active just like anything else in the body or else it will start to fall apart.

Oh well that's all I really have to say.