A Story
While I usually take the bus to work in the morning so I can get in some reading, on my way home I usually end up taking the Metro and making the 20-minute hike up Mt. Saint Alban to our apartment building. It’s nice to get some exercise and fresh air after sitting in front of a computer all day.
As I near the end of my walk each night, I walk right by the National Cathedral. It’s been getting darker a little later these days as we move towards springtime, and so the light on the cathedral has been especially beautiful the past week or so. Tonight as I walked by, I peered up at the heights of this enormous building, trying to make out some of the gargoyles. I’ve always heard that there was a Darth Vader gargoyle up there somewhere, but I had never seen it and had no idea where it was.
I considered pulling out my iPhone to look it up on Wikipedia, but it just felt like a little too much effort and I had to hurry and grab some dinner before a basketball game on TV. Besides, why stare down for three minutes at the glowing screen of my iPhone when I could spend those three minutes watching the glow of the setting sun on the facade of the cathedral?
In those three minutes looking at the cathedral, I thought about how lamentable it is that the wealth of information and the empowering connectivity of the Internet is tied to screens. It is indeed a remarkable advance that, with devices like the iPhone, the full Internet is now in our pockets. But it’s still on a screen in our pockets. When we want to look something up on the web, we have to briefly tune out everything and everyone around us — our reality — so that we can focus on the screen. Why do we have to abandon the object of our research, in order to research it?
So I walked out of my apartment this morning to head to work for a few hours, and it was hot outside. I was wearing a winter jacket and I had my knit hat in hand in preparation for what I thought would be a chilly stroll to the Metro. It is February, after all. I had even considered throwing on a sweater. Good thing I didn’t, because it was HOT. When I finally got to work, I looked up the temperature. The high in D.C. today is 74 degrees.
After drilling down to the
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