As I cannot sleep right now - my subconscious is sorting out some things for me - I ended up in a rather peculiar discussion. It was as if I was arguing with myself 15 years younger.

I communicated some stuff about something - this is purposefully generic - and the response I got included the wonderful phrase, "I have read many books..."

My. Well so have I. I could never have been a book burner. Any of the atrocities of knowledge in the past were things I probably would have been killed for. Someone might give the order, "Burn those scrolls" and I would say... "Hold on. I'm not done reading. Can you come back later?"

The point, though, is that no amount of books give one knowledge. Of course, reading a lot of books leads one to knowledge if approached properly - something education was originally designed for before it became training for jobs that are used to pay for a retirement or 401K that one may never live to enjoy. Challenging ideas is good, but no amount of books on women have helped man. People keep writing them, blaming chromosomes and hormone levels on all manner of things.

So we men have a lot of information at our disposal on women (and vice versa, I suppose), but we really don't know too much about women. Ask any woman.

Then there is the issue of prejudice that comes from books. Authors have bias. I know, I'm one and have read perhaps thousands more authors. Including the Internet, this means probably millions of authors. But if you ask me what I know about something that I have no experience with, then all I can give you is information.

I wish I knew that 15 years ago. Maybe I was a fool to say as much to someone 15 years younger. They won't listen. And that is knowledge.

Manuel Marino posted a troublesome piece for me - a piece about reading - or lack of it. He's quoting an article by Isaac Marion who runs BurningBuilding.com while working various jobs until his writing/music/art career take off.

I know that feeling.

But the article itself is worth the read - for those of you that do read, and it made me think of the journey of reading. These days, the 'semantic web' and search engines are the glory of the internet - but they are, I think, a hollow glory. It has been my experience that the most interesting things are found by accident - not on purpose. At first, they may not even be useful in a practical sense.