Thursday, December 13, 2007

I Don't Know

So, "I Don't Know" was going to be the title of the song I wrote. But, my youngest's album was "I Don't Know Yet", so I thought "Agnostia", that sounds cool, probably pretty much means "I Don't Know", sold. Hence the title of the last post.

Then, 2 hours later, the Google moment. Man, the days of stoner wisdom are so far behind us now -- "You know, no one's ever thought of this before". Self-deception of this sort is now pretty much right out. So, googling "agnostia" comes up with:

  • A punk/experimental/black metal/christian(???) rock & roll band out of Ft. Walton FL that existed 2000-2003. They have a skull and X-bones in the O of Agnostia.
  • A 20-something's blog posting on Dating Agnostia.
  • A species of orc in WarcraftRealms.com.
"There is nothing new under the sun." With 6.5 billion of us, this is true 99.999% of the time.

I think though, that "the google check" is a feature rather than a bug. Cause for the .001% of the time that you do come up with something original, you can know it.

Given, of course, that you googled the right term. Re some earlier posts, I was excited when googling "folk ontology" came up with nothing -- because everyone was using the term "folksonomy" instead :-(

Just finished the 4th book of The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross, "The Merchants' War". This series is totally working, numerous interesting threads, the 336 pages seems way too short. This series is generally considered to be patterned after Roger Zelazny's "Amber" stories -- which after maybe 3 200 page novels was hopelessly confused in its narrative direction. Stross's series is the antithesis of this, at this point I think it could go on for a dozen books and still be coherent. Stross is definitely one of the strongest science fiction/fantasy writers out there now.

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