Reading

Some months ago, I read an interesting article about the use of civilian experts in Afghanistan to 'map' the sociological environment - what they called 'human terrain mapping'. Neat, I thought; it reminded me of articles about people who hired professional anthropologists to map the culture of companies, with an eye toward improving how the companies function. Later, I read another article about how some people -- there's always critics -- were saying that human terrain mapping wasn't all that effective, and could actually promote the kind of results that the mapping was supposed to forestall. Last Sunday, there was an article in the Washington Post magazine about the practice; I didn't read it. Yeah, yeah, I thought. This is old news.

When I thought that a certain medical person was a friend of mind, I would occasionally send her articles that I'd come across about medical research, thinking that since I found them interesting, she might, too. Then one day she informed me that the things I read were old news; she'd read about them in JAMA and the like, months, sometimes years, before. Sort of like when I lived in Boston and thought it'd be a dandy idea to supplement my working with EDS by going over to MIT and taking the occasional class in 'computers' from them. They gently told me that the things that I was working with then, their freshmen students had known about three or four years before. They didn't say it was out of the question that I could take courses there, but any thoughts that I could just drop in and pick up some knowledge were quickly dashed.

So now I read a lot. And every so often, I come across something that's novel, and interesting, and I wonder: is this new? Or just new to me?