The font of all wisdom

I swear sometimes reading plastic feels like I’m auditing a college course on whatever the topic may be. A recent discussion had a thread on the Arab development of the printing press that enlightened me on: where their cursive script comes from, the origin of the word Byzantine, why Latin has no U or J character, a brief history of Turkish graphic arts, a more detailed history of written Arabic, briefly how Chinese pictographs developed and the origins of the word Allah from the original Aramaic term Alleh that Jesus would also have used to refer to God.

That’s just from one single thread in a broader discussion. What a rush. Why can’t my everyday life at work be filled with all these ideas and history? Are our policy makers this informed about the development of mass communication in the Arabic world? What matters I suppose is what I do with this knowledge. Ideas are great, but action is what counts. At this point all this reading just gave me more useless trivia.

What’s even better is I could probably hit google and find scholars to contradict all the things I just “learned.” Wow. Feeling: awed