Two seemingly unrelated ideas from blog posts, where the thing they have in common on the surface is exactly what their fundamental common bond is:
"When I was a kid, I loved baseball more than anything, and I’m afraid I mean that literally — more than my family, my friends, even more than my dog. If given the opportunity, I would have played baseball 24 hours a day. And when I couldn’t play it, I would watch it on T.V.
Now I can barely sit through a whole inning of a game on T.V."
--Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics Blog
"So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."
--Clay Shirky, quoted by Marginal Revolution
Dubner's quote also describes me, both as a kid and as an adult. I think it would still describe me no matter what baseball did to try to maximize the quality of its telecasts, because I've learned two important lessons since being a kid:
1. (less important) Attending a major league game in person is a tremendously satisfying experience to which TV can't possibly compare.
2. (more important) Adult life is chock full of tremendously satisfying experiences to which TV can't possibly compare.
Posted by Matt Bruce at April 29, 2008 01:32 PM