I'd recently found a Facebook posting of a TED talk, that reminded me of something someone said sometime in the 70's, "I never listen to any music I haven't heard before." The TED talk concerns something called the filter bubble an artifact of the way search engines operate. They use algorithms that select items that are expected to be of interest to the user and effectively filter out the rest. Effectively resulting in a dumbing down of users. Users will not be exposed to things they haven't previously encountered. The phrase knowledge entropy occurred to me. Could this be the end of serendipity? There is something to be said for thumbing through card catalogs and browsing the stacks in some university library. On-line search engines should be thought of as the starting point for research, possibly like encyclopedias, not the heart of the research. During my time in graduate school, in Geography, one could not cite encyclopedias nor would National Geographic be accepted as research sources. This did not mean they couldn't be used as starting points, however.

I removed the links that apparently now return errors