Prof. Robert B. Laughlin, StanfordUniversity gets his name in history books (again!) for being the first Nobel Laureate that I have ever seen in flesh! Just kidding…He shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect.
The occasion being the talk he gave at PARC – ‘The crime of reason’
Here’s the abstract of the talk in his words -
“There is increasing talk about the disappearance of technical knowledge from the public domain, both because it is a security danger and because it is economically valuable. I argue that this development is not anomalous at all but a great historic trend tied to our transition to the information age. We are in the process of losing a human right that all of us thought we had but actually didn't - the right to learn things as we can and better ourselves economically from what we learn. Increasingly, figuring out important things (as opposed to unimportant ones) for yourself will become theft and terrorism. Increasingly, reason itself will become a crime.”
Most important reason is I am lazy! There is so much going on in my head all the time that it is not really possible to put all these (mostly incoherent) ideas into a (meaningful) blog post. Just off the top of my head things that I would like to blog about are …trip to Kanha national park in may06, Konkan trip with my family in jan08, thoughts after my India trip, my parents’ visit to US, recent Vegas trip, Camping in Big trees state park, Rafting at American river…so on and so forth…The main motivation to start my blog was to keep track of interesting things that I was/am doing (For e.g. rants are not particularly interesting to a general audience but a hiking trip?…maybe). So twitter serves as a temporary relief that I have kept a note of this “thing” for now and it is fine even if I don’t find time to blog about it.
Secondly, many times I get many (weird) ideas while say driving or just while living my life. Not all of them are worthy a blog post. In these cases twitter works the best! That’s what ‘micro-blogging’ is all about!
Just to make it clear I don’t think that the world needs to know “what I am doing right now”. That is why stayed away from it till now but for reasons stated above I thought I should twitter too! IMO it’s a nice way to snapshot your mind a few times a day!
Potential risks?
Some of the folks are taking twitter’s message (“what are you doing right now?”) too seriously and update their status a little too often with (mostly useless?) information such as “I just made dinner… I am eating it now...wow it is so good and yummy...I am sleeping now…I am asleep and dreaming about XXX (I meant fill in the blanks btw!) right now…” Ok. I made up the last one but you get the point -Potentially people are giving out too much personal information. But that is true with blogging or with pretty much with all other web 2.0 features (social networking websites etc.) too. Just be careful about what you write about and you will be fine. Lets say you are an insanely beautiful female (these days this applies to guys too!) and has a bunch of stalkers then it will be a really bad idea to update the world on where you are and what you are doing all the time!
How do I twitter?
Currently I am looking for some cool tool/Firefox extension etc as I hate going to twitter.com every time to check (others’) and update (my) status. If you know something that I can use do shout back!
