More on Concentration . . . .

The Sunday Times has an article this week by Bryan Appleyard entitled "Stoooopid - why the Google generation isn't as smart as it thinks". This covers the same area as the article from the Independent a few days ago.

This tends to focus more on the idea of "distractions". It also notes that one way to consider the problem is to say that today we "go outside of ourselves to make all the connections that we used to make inside of ourselves"

And as "big money" is on the side of distracting us, the situation will not improve.

At a more general level, there is a quote from the ecologist, Bill McKibben

"The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have lost"

This is true more generally than just in respect of learning and the internet. It is the reason why no action will be taken on long-term climate change - each generation does not miss what the previous generation things of as a loss.

Spent much of the afternoon watching the Tour de France on tv and reading the first couple of chapters of James Reston's biography of Galileo. I am reading it more critically and, interestingly, more from the point of view of my MSc and the sort of scholarly attention to themes that I might not otherwise have brought to the book.