un-satiable curtiosity

December 9, 2013

I'm staying at the Talaris Conference Centre this week to run a sold out Cognitive Edge course and its a great location other than for (i) the flaky internet and (ii) the lack of diabetic friendly food at breakfast.  One consequence of the flaky internet is a lot of breaks in workflow and the temptation to check out news sites.  In the course of doing that I found this story in the Guardian.   I don't know about you (the reader) but I find it an inspiring tribute to human knowledge and curiosity.  Three generations of editors and a century of work to complete a Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.  Oh the face of it a futile effort, but so is most primary research in any field.  Judging the pursuit of knowledge solely in terms of short term expediency is barbarism.  Of course in this case the language is central to the history of medieval Europe and critical to out understanding of the origin of the nation state; if you can't see why that is important then I weep for your generation.

Incidentally, I've got a fair amount of back-filing to do on the blog as I am resolved to get to a near daily record in December.   A few for the record in November and eight for the first days of December will take me a day or so but I will get there.  A few long walks in that cycle and some serious stuff as well.   As is my habit anything serious will get tweeted, personal blogs and minor reflections are for those with an RSS feed.

The title of this post should be familiar to anyone who has read Kipling (a necessary but not sufficient condition of being educated) but I intend no crocodiles or spankings ….

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