Well, I was duped.

For the last month or so I have told over a dozen people about how cool “The Da Vinci Code” is, and in just 45 minutes I was shown by the History channel how relaxed my sense of skepticism had become.

First, I’ll start off with my mistake. I allowed myself to be tricked by one of the oldest tricks in the book — linking fact with fiction. I was quite aware that there was fiction in the book, and also that there was fact. What I was obviously quite out of touch with, however, was where the line was.

Since the Christianity-oriented areas were obviously not a big deal to me, I latched onto the “nuggets” of history in the book for my source of enjoyment. A few of these included the pentacle/Oylymic link, the Mona Lisa genetic ambiguity, the woman in The Last Supper, the marginal line through the church, etc. These tidbits of information that I’d never heard of before, combined with the concept of femininity being demonized by the Christian church in an organized way, were very interesting to me. What I did was allowed the impact of the book to become greater than any one of the nuggets, until finally the book became larger than life.

The problem here is that I should have kept myself from being taken by the book. In other words, very few things at this stage of my development should interest me to this degree, or at least without me doing extensive research on the matter before allowing it to. While I didn’t believe in the Holy Grail myth any more after reading the book than I did before, I did evangelize the novel as if I did. I’ve told countless people that it was a must-read, and that there was so much history in it separate from the Christianity side of it. It now seems that some, if not much of that history is false.

Again, I was duped.

On the positive side, I never believed any of the Christian conspiracy or secret society threads in the book; I accepted all that as part of the fiction. All I really did believe was the nuggets that I spoke of, but that’s more than enough to evoke my shame. At this point, it’s important to me that I seek out the truth related to all these so-called “nuggets”. Were the Olympic rings reallly related to a “sacred feminine” circle? An esteemed colleague of mine says no. Was the Mona Lisa really meant to be androgynous? Was the person to the right of Christ really painted as a woman, or was it a man with a purposeful feminine appearance? These are the things I found so interesting about the novel, and I intend to find out how many of them are true.

Here are a few resources that explore Dan Brown’s carelessness and/or attempts to mislead readers:

James Patrick Holding On The Da Vinci Code The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code: A Challenging Response to the Bestselling Novel The Da Vinci Deception Breaking The Da Vinci Code : Answers to the Questions Everybody’s Asking

Ultimately, the main lesson I am going to take away from this is that of humility. To some degree, it’s one’s belief in their own intellectualism that drives them to latch onto new, exciting information like that contained within the novel. This is especially true when the information puts some organization that one feels superior to in a bad light.

The fact that I took many things put forth in the book at face value is quite lame, but to allow it to happen again would be an utter crime. I must ensure that this doesn’t happen, and writing this post is one step in that direction. Another step will be apologizing to each person I recommended the book to. Hat in hand, I’ll explain that I too became a sheep.

Baaaa.

– Edit: By the way, the biggest crime that Dan Brown seems to have commited here lies at the very beginning of the novel. There he immediately claims that every bit of information pertaining to art, history, architecture, etc. is absolutely true. It was precisely these aspects that I enjoyed so much, and it seems that this small bit of programming at the very beginning was enough to keep me from becoming skeptical about his facts. Shame on me.

This guy has an interesting take on Podcasting that I have been thinking about for a long time but been unable to put my finger on. The bottom line is that time is precious, and there are certain things I do with mine–each of which requires a certain amount of attention.

Podcasting is only worthwhile when you are regularly in a position that precludes you from getting any real work done. 1.

The only real scenarios that fit this in my view are commuting or working some sort of position where monitoring something is the main task (and the thing you are monitoring for doesn’t happen very frequently). In other words, if I am at work, for example, I am doing work that requires too much of my attention to get anything out of something being piped into my ear. On the other hand, if I have actuall free time, I am likely to spend it doing something more constructive than catching up on blog-oriented content, i.e. the opinions and goings-on of others that share my interests.

I’d much rather spend my free time learning something, or even better, creating something, i.e. programming, writing, etc. An audiobook is even an option, (since it’s basically reading) but not listening to the current, un-condensed opinion of my famous peers. It’s just not worth my time.

1. My buddy has posted a response to this opinion and forced me to re-examine my own post. I think some clarification is in order. What I meant to say was that if I don’t have a very specific type of free time, I cannot fit Podcasting content into my day. In other words, the free time has to be along the lines of commuting or doing casual work — not absolute free time or real thought-intensive work. And since most of my time is in one of those two modes, my Podcasting-compatible windows are few and far between. Far be it from me to say that it’s not worth anything to anyone, it just doesn’t fit for me currently.

Just in case anyone’s interested, this woman is an absolute goddess. If you don’t believe me, check out Googles image archive of her. She’s being called one of the most beautiful women in the world, and for good reason. Of course, I have another beauty at home as well…

…that’s how long this country has as a superpower. How do I know this? Well, it seems that the tsunami hotline setup to help friends and family to locate missing Americans has been receiving a plethora of calls. No big deal, right? Well, the problem lies in the fact that, according to a CNN article, many of the Americans have been calling about their friends in China, Germany, and even Vermont. Yes, Vermont.

(letting it sink in…)

Ok, maybe you missed it. Americans, from this country, have been calling the tsunami hotline asking about friends that are on vacation on different continents from where the disaster took place.

Let’s imagine a conversation:

Hotline Operator: Hello? American: Hi, I’m looking for a friend of mine; I’m very worried. Hotline Operator: Ok, no problem, where were they vacationing? American: Vermont.

Seriously, we’re so highly screwed.

It seems many in the academic community are coming out publically against Wikipedia — which in my opinion is one of the coolest things available on the Internet.

The argument seems to be that having information available online, vs. only through higher learning institutions such as universities and libraries, somehow diminishes the education you receive when using the Internet method. Or, in other words, getting educated via the Internet will necessarily yield an inferior education.

Perhaps it’s because I just read the latest Dan Brown book, but I can’t help but see a similarity between this idea and one of the main tenets of the Catholic church. The notion of, “You can only get true education by going through our universities.” is strikingly similar to, “You can only be truly saved by going throug our churches.” Naturally, both sentiments are disturbing to me.

I think it’s time, at least in the case of education in the Internet culture, for institutions such as Universities to realize a simple fact. Universites were centers for learning in the past for a very simple reason — you couldn’t get that concentration of information anywhere else. This is not so much the case anymore. I wouldn’t say the Internet easily yields an Ivy Leauge education yet, but this isn’t for lack of information; it’s due to the environmental differences and strict rules imposed on students at Harvard vs. at ones computer desk at home. So in that sense I agree with the argument being made by the academics; the environment in a good university is still more conducive to learning than the average household.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only avenue they are attacking; they are going after the very quality of the information being offered by these newer mediums. The main reason for this is as old as dirt–ego, and fear of becoming obsolete.

Below, Clay Shirky (an academic himself) puts it quite nicely: (excerpt from Boing Boing)

Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privelege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia’s driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress — the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.

It’s not that it doesn’t matter what academics think of the Wikipedia — it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well.

So, another year…

Despite finding the last few transitions to the new year quite dull, this one reached a new low. I was in bed before midnight and didn’t have the slightest motivation to observe the festivities. To what can I attribute this? Age? Current priorities?

Whatever the reason, it was a non-event.

(yawn)