{"id":459,"date":"2006-01-16T08:12:04","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T12:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=459"},"modified":"2006-01-16T08:12:04","modified_gmt":"2006-01-16T12:12:04","slug":"the-critical-mass-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=459","title":{"rendered":"The critical mass of information&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A former student of mine has a blog where she occasionally puts things down in free verse (something I needed an explanation of &#8230; clueless me when she was an English grad student, right?).  This morning, I responded with a sonnet.  Awful, of course, but since her entry was vaguely about the problems of learning too much, I felt the need to point out that part of the role of grad student is to acquire enough information to put scholarly writings into perspective: what&#8217;s new, what&#8217;s a real contribution. Okay, with a twist at the end.<br \/>\nHistorians claim that Los Alamos<br \/>\nwas where the nascent sub-critical mass,<br \/>\nanalyzed over poached eggs and dry toast,<br \/>\nwas then declared a failure or a pass.<br \/>\nThose one percent, we ex-grad student fools,<br \/>\nknow better. Reading we came upon ore,<br \/>\nmind through dross with our self-sharpening tools,<br \/>\nfor nuggets of insight. The open doors<br \/>\nto that written, printed uranium<br \/>\ndid not carry any red hazard sign,<br \/>\nwarning us <em>too much and a cranium<br \/>\nexplodes or, worse, learns<\/em>. But now it&#8217;s just fine.<br \/>\nRedrafted dissertations come and go,<br \/>\ndeconstructing old Michaelangelo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A former student of mine has a blog where she occasionally puts things down in free verse (something I needed an explanation of &#8230; clueless me when she was an English grad student, right?). This morning, I responded with a sonnet. Awful, of course, but since her entry was vaguely about the problems of learning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-comments"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-7p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}