Erdos Had The Number First

So, I guess I’m a blogger now.

Here’s the thing, I’ve made fun of bloggers for a while now. I never
bought into the hype, I never bought into the ‘this changes
everything’ mentality that seemed to characterize the entire blogging
movement. This is partly because I think groups of people are stupid.

Not stupid in a ‘Why can’t Johnny read’ way, but stupid in a
‘regression toward the mean’ kind of way.

Maybe that’s not bad.

But anyway, now I’ve got a blog and I’m trying to figure out if I
should apologize to all the people I argued with who told me that
it’s not a movement, who told me it’s not anything other than the
journal reformed.

I’ve never liked the thought of journaling. Which is bad, because if
I want to write, I should be keeping a journal. I argued with my
writing profs in school, I’ve argued with anyone who would argue that
journaling is not a prerequisite of writing. But it probably is.

Perhaps not the formal journaling of a historian, but some way to put
down the thought fragments that occur and are so often lost. How many
times on the el in the morning have the great ideas of the age been
lost to ‘I’ll write that down as soon as I get to work’.

This extended sort of digression is the one argument that I still have
against blogs. This whole thing, assuming you’ve read this far, is
really just a stream of consciousness with very little editing. How
can that help anyone?