My most-recent blog column at The Register is up, and I don't think you need a password to access it. Excerpt:
The army of half-read books in my study has prompted me to think a lot about the problem of information and knowledge. How do we gain knowledge? What information should we seek? How do we know we can trust the information we find?
It's an acute problem these days, with information hitting us every waking moment – cable TV, satellite radio, mobile feeds on our cellphones, newspapers, magazines and, of course, the Internet's swarm of Web pages (8 billion pages from more than 100 million websites).
The Internet's orc-like hordes of websites have helped many people realize a few fundamental truths about knowledge and information that I suspect most people 20 or more years ago didn't appreciate: You never have all the facts. Whenever you trust a source of information, you are undertaking a leap of faith in the source's authority. And no authority on factual matters is definitive.
As a younger man, I once wrote, “The redneck substitutes blanket skepticism for wisdom.” Now that I'm getting older, I'm beginning to think the redneck ain't so dumb after all. In fact, the real wise man understands that he knows very little when contrasted with everything there is to know. I suspect the Internet and its suffocating avalanche of information makes every person a bit wiser in this respect.
