There is no real definition of blogging. When no one is telling you how many inches you have to fill and by what time, then you can use as much or as little time as you like, to write as long or as short as you like. Blogging is essentially the ultimate freedom of expression, since there are no constraints. It is therefore not possible to define what a blog is from some manual. The only way is to observe how blogs are written and see whether there is a certain style that is more common than others. And there is one. The most common style of blogging is reminiscent of one principle from the open source method: release early, release often. Most blogs are relatively short and don't try to take on many arguments. Which is why they are also not too hard to write. You can limit your scope to a small and comfortable size.

Of course, blogs are a relatively new thing. A lot of people now have a voice who prior to blogging didn't have a suitable channel. But there is one group of people whose blogging predates the internet era. They have been doing it for centuries, albeit not always with the same level of freedom that we do, and sometimes under great pressure. What they have on us, however, is an audience.

If you're not familiar with how Catholic Mass works, it's a bit like a tv show. The introductory clip and the credits are always the same, the commercials always come at the same time and that defines the structure. You say the same words, you sing the same songs. For some parts you sit, for some you stand, for some you kneel. Then there is the content portion which changes depending on the Catholic calendar. But this too is completely scripted and if you come back on the same day next year, you'll hear the same thing. The highlight of the Mass is a two piece segment. First comes the Gospel, and for this you have to stand, unfortunately. This is a reading from the New Testament (boy they should give them more books to choose from) selected by the priest. Then comes the blog, or sometimes called "the sermon".

The sermon is a relief, as you can finally sit down. It's also a long segment, which means you can doze off a bit. Once when I was a kid I was so bored during the sermon that I actually fell asleep, hit my head on the bench in front of me. Whether you're a sinner or not, Sunday Mass is like your weekly purgatory. Getting out of going used to be my highest priority goal. One loophole is to attend Mass on a weekday, because the sermon is only given on Sundays, which makes Mass half an hour instead of an hour. You can then do away with your weekly guilt trip and on paper you're clean.

Anyway, now that I look back on it, the blog is actually the only part of the Mass that I would keep today. Certainly the only part that might be interesting to non-Catholics. It's basically a blog being read to you. The extent to which this is interesting depends on how smart your priest is. And a lot of priests are smart. I don't know if that's a qualification, but if you had a very dim individual, the people in the audience (especially the smarter ones) wouldn't want to listen to his drivel and would go to another church.

The blog is unique in the Mass in that it's a complete freestyle event. And priests are typically so bored with all the rituals that they embrace this opportunity to talk about something of their own choosing. This is the only time you'll hear the priest talk to you in his own words. In the church that I used to go to, the blogs were exclusively uplifting messages and had no religious content in them. They would generally be stories and anecdotes about people that would make you think, and whose message was to be a nice person and treat people nicely. It's really quite a nice thing to do, fill people every week with a good spirit, and a positive outlook. As I got older, and not long before I decided that I had done enough church going for one life, I started to appreciate the blogs a lot. I felt they had a positive influence on me, just as I gradually felt less and less attached to the church. In fact, some people consider this Sunday blogging on equal terms with reading a good book or watching a good movie. It gives you something to think about. In fact, a few have taken it so far as to occasionally wander into a Protestant church (naughty!) thinking the blog there might be more interesting.

So these guys (Catholic church is very conservative, no women priests. Protestants have them, though) have a real tradition for blogging that goes back a long time. Priests have been up there every Sunday (good thing Mass on weekdays doesn't have it, or they'd have to write a new blog every day, although many current blogging 'experts' recommend this) carrying that torch. As a matter of fact, since they are just blogs, they could just as well be posted online as well. I don't know if anyone is doing this, but it would be nice to share that creativity with the rest of the world. And it would allow the audience to post comments, something that is frowned upon in church (what did you say about the man who had an accident? that didn't really make sense).

What's interesting is that we have now started doing the same thing that they have been doing all these years. And I don't think we really intended to imitate, did we? Think about how cool it would be to do a guest blog in church. :cool:

I have to admit that this writing business is a little eccentric. I mean who writes? Isn't that for authors? Most people don't even do much reading, let alone writing. And those who're not interested in reading more are definitely not inclined to start writing. What for?

I had never written anything before I went to junior high. Before that learning a language was all about you know, learning the language. Then they recast it as, well, using the language. They wanted to have discussions in class. And they gave us essay questions. It is a strange thing to do. You pick a topic off a list and you have to write an essay about it. About something you have no opinion on. I mean to what end? But once you learn the game, it's not hard. You just make up a standpoint and argue it. It doesn't matter what you decide, just as long as you can write a coherent argument. Of course, one other thing you learn is to lie. If the essay question is asking whether schools should assign more homework or less, you obviously argue for more. You give the people what they want, and they give you the higher grade. Telling people what they want to hear is a useful skill.

So that's what they teach you in school, to argue for standpoints. And to be... flexible in your stand. Frankly it makes no difference: what you write in an essay is not going to affect anything, so you can fake it without repercussions.

I guess I would be surprised to hear this back then, but this essay writing turns out to be a useful exercise. It's practical to be able to write arguments. It's not precisely the skill you need to get your job done, but it tends to come up, now and then.

So writing is a bit eccentric. And you may wonder why you should. Certainly, there are plenty of people writing about why you should be writing. Some will respond that they don't have anything to say, and therefore nothing to write. Others might say that they find reading more useful, because it gives them a chance to read material at a level they themselves could not produce.

Here is the thing. Writing is not some sort of special activity that comes with a license. If you have thoughts, you can write. Because that's all it is: expressing thought. It is a very different form of "thinking" than thought itself. It is impossible to just "write down" your thoughts, because they are all over the place. Your text, on the other hand, has to be something that holds together. So the process of writing is applying structure and plot (a progression) to a thought.

You may wonder why this is useful. Then think about how we communicate. We do not plug our brains together and synchronize our thoughts. We have to go through this process of taking a thought, verbalizing it in a specific, structured manner, and sending it across to the other person. This is the only way we know to interact. And however different this is from thinking itself, we are stuck doing this, it's the only way we can exchange ideas.

So where does honesty come into it? Let me motivate that. Verbal communication is a chaotic and erratic activity. It is also not accountable. If I tell you at the beginning of a conversation that I believe students should be assigned more homework, and if I later realize that this is an inconvenient standpoint in light of where the conversation has gone, I can change it. I can tell you that I never said I thought more homework was a good idea. And you can't prove that I didn't say it. I'm the authority on what I said, because I know my motives. And there is no record, all you can say is that you remember I said something different from what I'm claiming now. But I'm refuting that accusation. There's nothing you can do to make me accountable.

Notice that this is only the simplest example. I can twist words, I can take things out of context, I can be very unfair to your statements. And because it's a progressing, verbal exchange, it's quite difficult for you to pinpoint where I'm cheating and call me out. Do you think I could get away with the same thing if I had to put it in writing? I couldn't. Because you could point out any two spots in my text that are mutually contradictory and prove that my statement isn't even coherent. Or you could point to a place where I'm twisting words or taking things out of context and say that I'm cheating. It's easy to do that when there is evidence.

Given a choice, which would you rather have? Would you rather convince me with an argument that isn't coherent, but where the flaws are so well hidden that I can't figure out why your argument seems to be right even though something doesn't quite fit? Or would you rather have an actual coherent and convincing argument to present? Heck, even if you could convince me with completely flawed reasoning and I wouldn't know a thing, where only you would know the deception, wouldn't you rather have an honest argument?

In a sense, this is what writing is all about. It is taking a train of thought that seems to be a convincing argument and fleshing it out so that when you articulate it as a statement, it is coherent and convincing. And therefore it is about applying a certain rigor to a train of thought, checking whether something that seems convincing really is.

What might surprise you is that practicing to write not only improves writing ability, it also makes you more convincing in conversation. It happens because you begin to apply the same rigor when composing a statement in conversation that you do in writing. This counters the intuition that some people have about the internet. I'm talking about the school of thought that says talking to people on the internet isn't real, why don't you get a life. As if what we do "in here" (a strange name for a globally interconnected network) is completely disconnected from what happens "out there" (in your local neighborhood). But the mind is not so disjoint, when you practice writing arguments it affects how you construct arguments in speech as well. And it helps keep you honest, because even though cheating is much easier, you think to yourself I could not get away with this in writing.

Of course, there are many other reasons why writing is useful, and as I alluded to, there are plenty of bloggers out there who encourage blogging for various reasons. I don't find all of them convincing, but the one thing you can say for certain is that it's a different way of interacting with your thoughts. And it's a way to be precise about thoughts and have that train of thought on the books for something you can return to.

Think about the last time you went to see a doctor. What happened? You spoke, right? Explained your symptoms? You were examined? And then? Got a prescription, did you? Or just advice on how to better your situation? Well, this is what most visits are like, most of mine anyway have been like this. In most cases it was only a conversation and in many cases there wasn't even an examination involved.

Doctors have an odd profession. In the course of their education they have to learn an extraordinary number of facts about diseases and ailments. Alright, so everyone has to learn a lot of stuff. But when they get out of school, they're not using their knowledge to build bridges, or write tv commercials, or fix vacuum cleaners. They just sort of give out parts of that knowledge bit by bit to patients. You come in, you explain your problem, the doctor digs deep into his vast database of knowledge and pulls out the bit of information that is relevant to your situation.

- Doc, I'm having trouble with my foot.
- You might have a swollen ankle. Do this, don't do that. Eat this, don't eat that. Good luck!

Their whole business is based on disseminating personalized information in little portions, at the appropriate time. It's like a temporary storage for information. Hold on to this and remind me at the appropriate time. They are walking encyclopedias, essentially. And, in fact, seeing a doctor is often called "a consultation". So they are consultants. You come to them if you want to know something about their field of expertise.

Can you think of anything else that works this way? Yes, a search engine. The symptoms is the index (think of the alphabetical index in the library), it tells you where the information is. You follow that and you get to the information you're looking for.

Of course, it isn't only what you say. A doctor will use all information about you to make a diagnosis, not just what you tell him in words. He'll also determine whether you look well, whether your pupils are dilated, whether your voice is changed, whether your breathing is normal etc. And he has your medical history available to him, as well as basic facts like age and weight, all of which goes into a deliberation of the most likely thing to be wrong with you.

But if you could actually articulate all of this information, then the role of a doctor could just as well be succeeded by a search engine that would give you the same information. In fact, it could actually be a much better doctor too. Just think of all the knowledge that a doctor has, based on all the experience and all the patients he's seen. When you come to him, that is everything he has available to him to understand your situation. In fact, I have the impression that a doctor who is just out of school isn't very good, because he has no experience. After working a couple of years, having seen hundreds of patients, he's building a database of knowledge that is invaluable to judge what the most likely problem is, given how many possible ailments exhibit similar symptoms. So it's a statistics game, the more experience you have, the more skilled you are.

But just imagine pooling *all* the knowledge that *all* doctors have all in one place and making it searchable. That would be the most knowledgeable doctor of all time. You could present any set of symptoms and if there's one doctor on the planet who has seen this before, you would get a good answer. (Think Google.)

It would also decrease the demand for doctors considerably. If there is now one doctor for 100 people, there could be one to 1000 if the other 9 were replaced. Of course, sometimes you need instruments to do an examination, so you couldn't do this at home, you'd still have to go to the clinic, but it would be a more do-it-yourself kind of place.

One upshot of not having a human doctor would actually be that you wouldn't have to lie about embarrassing problems. This is a real issue for doctors today. Patients don't want to tell the truth when it's humiliating, so they lie and the doctor has to see through this (and of course you *do* eventually want your doctor to know the truth to get the right diagnosis, you just don't want to have to say it) and use his judgment and a little diplomacy to help you despite yourself.

So what about those 9 doctors that aren't needed? Well, they could be working to enrich the database of information. In our current model, educating doctors means giving the same information to everyone (ie. massive duplication) and sending every guy to a different place to see patients. And there is an obvious limit to how much a person can learn in 4-5 years, so every doctor has the same limitation. Instead, what we could have is put those 9 people to work on different things (experimental drugs, studies of diseases and so on) and the huge database of information would be ever richer and more useful.

It's funny the things you don't appreciate without having a special, personal viewpoint into that realm of things that aren't seen. It's like you have to tilt your head to see it. No no, not like that. Okay, stop tilting, it's not happening.

Remember the last time you had an orange? Nothing special about it, was there? Hah, told you you couldn't see it. Remember the last time you had an orange while down with a bout of flu and a sore throat? Ah-ha!

First comes that eerie phase of deliberation. When you notice someone is up to something. Got evil on his mind. It all gets buried beneath the standard fabricated lines that are supposed to lull the victim into a false sense of security. It's for your own good, I say to the poor bastard.

And then, with a glimmer of glee, I think to myself buddy, this is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me. Heck, this guy's been acting up all day, it's time he got a dose of his own medicine.

And then I realize that alas, you and I are both neurotically interconnected in the same organism. Should have thought of that, but it's too late now. The first bite comes in. A small seismic shock follows. The whole structure just sits there oscillating for a little bit. All of a sudden I hear myself screaming. I've been screaming the whole time, but it's only now that I realize. With eye closed in trepidation the last remains of orange juice make their way down. In cold sweat I look up. It's over. Somehow the little shack held up to the storm. Another one of those might...

I look at the orange. I've never seen an orange this big. What we just went through was taking a small bite of it, but the thing is still the same size it was at the beginning. This is gonna be a long 20 minutes. Like getting a succession of vaccination injections right in the same spot.

The answer is obviously no. Or at least one can hope.

I've never enjoyed cooking. Somehow I've never seen the joy of manipulating food from a raw state to something edible. I don't know what it is people get so excited about. One of the reasons I don't like it is because of how messy it is. I really get no satisfaction out of immersing my hands into that dough only to have to wash it off for 10 minutes afterwards. In fact, the whole process is just a big mess. I stop to think about how much washing up there is going to be and that alone makes me appreciate someone other than me doing the cooking.

Are some people more aware of being clean than others? People say you just don't want to get your hands dirty, and it's true. There's no reason for my hands to be dirty, when they are I go wash them. Meanwhile there are people in this world whose hands are visibly greasy and they don't seem to even notice.