Getting It Wrong

A logical guess as to who said "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" is Yogi Berra . . . but it was actually Danish physicist Neils Bohr, and he certainly hit the nail on the head -- humanity is always getting it wrong, very wrong, when we speculate on how technology and culture will evolve . . . to hear more on this topic, listen to the Freakonomics podcast called Who Runs the Internet?; coincidentally, last week one of my students showed the class the picture above and talked about how he loved looking at old visions of the future -- and, as Clay Shirky pointed out during an interview in the podcast-- we had the imagination to conceive all kinds of wild scenarios: flying cars and floating cities . . . but in all of these visions, women were still wearing aprons and stuck in the kitchen . . . we could imagine a mailman wearing a jet-pack, but not a female lawyer in a pantsuit.

Unresolutions for 2011

I am proud to say that I successfully complied with my 2010 Resolution--  not once did I create an ersatz Yogi Berra quotation in 2010 . . . so I have kicked that habit; for 2011, I am going to pay homage to the great Geoff Dyer (who wrote the ultimate un-book, Out of Sheer Rage, which is ostensibly a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but actually a treatise on procrastination and motivation; he never actually writes the biography-- although it is found in the BIO section of the library) and instead of resolving to do things this year, I am resolving to not do things, and Geoff Dyer put this better than me in this passage-- you should read the whole thing-- but if you're lazy, he essentially boils it down to this aphorism: Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together . . . and so here is my list of things that I resolve to remain "not interested in" for the year of 2011:

1) The theater (expensive, time-consuming, and it's for old people);

2) Golf (ditto);

3) The NHL;

4) Reality TV (even Jersey Shore);

5) The phrases "It is what it is," and "You know what I mean";

6) Tron nostalgia;

7) Going to PTO meetings (thanks Catherine!);

8) Baking;

9) Organizing the crawl space (thanks Catherine!);

10) Oprah's Book Club.