“The Blogsquatcher” – The Archives

January 8, 2010 2:53 PM

I hope the holiday season has treated you kindly. Not uncharacteristically, I’m feeling very lazy at the moment. But, in an effort to get back into the swing of things, here is an article that I ran across in my foraging that makes a point I am always trying to make myself — we don’t know everything, and probably not even as much aswe think we know.

Fisher was interviewed in October by National Public Radio after NASA scientists discovered a mysterious ribbon of hydrogen around our solar system. The layer, a sort of protective barrier called the heliosphere, shields us from harmful cosmic radiation. Its existence defies all expectations about what the edge of the solarsystem might look like.

Fisher’s response: “We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns.”

In other words: We don’t know what we don’t know until we know that we don’t know it.

Life is funny that way. You think you’ve got the world wrapped up in string, only to watch some bit of news come along to unravel your comprehension of how things work.

The article discusses the fifty things we didn’t know this time last year, and it’s worth a bit of your time. I like this one:

10. Surfing the Internet may help delay dementia because it creates stimulation that exercises portions of the brain.

And then there’s this:

2. Grumpy people think more clearly because negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking.

Yarr! Get off my cyberlawn, you rotten kids!

Via The Presurfer.

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