Driving the point of the previous post more deeply:
[Alice says to the Cheshire Cat] “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
We’ve been listening to a LibriVox recording of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and there was a passage (in bold below) from the first chapter that lodged in my head, and which seems to me to get to the heart of the epistemological challenge:
There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. ‘Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) ‘I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, ‘Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
A couple of weeks back I posted a lament about my decade long inability to gain blogging momentum, along with a resolution and plan to correct that.
Resolution, broken. Plan, abandoned. Posts, deleted.
I’m not surprised. The lament and resolution were sincere but it was a bad plan. The thing is, I don’t actually want to blog about me, or cool sites or killer apps or breaking tech news or what not.
That said, I think I might like to try to get some conversations started about the work I do, and so I will do my best to fill this site with posts devoted to the three kinds of geekery that fill my days: researching, writing and teaching.
Maybe you spend your time doing these things too. If so, I hope you’ll stick around.