A Road to Destruction Paved With Fine Words. Clive Fisher, right, offers the latest biography of Hart Crane, the grand American Romantic poet whose life was short, messy and stupifyingly self-destructive. By Holland Cotter. [New York Times: Arts]

I'm reading Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined and he states on page 143 that you can view the Web as containing two forms of knowledge: the database and the joke. His point is that much of what we seek on the web is knowledge that supplies pure information, i.e. the kind that is in a database. What is the electrical impedence of a particular chip? Yada yada...

But the human quest for knowledge is about more than cataloguing data, and sorting it into relevant piles according to some taxonomy. People seek "fat" knowledge, which is where the jokes come in. Jokes are "sudden knowledge." They depend on the unexpected. And yet that unexpected element makes a point, and supplies knowledge. This is the sort of thing that AI [Artificial Intelligence] people don't obsess about, but which web-surfers are constantly seeking out. It is the 25 foot wave that we want to ride because the outcome is unpredictable.

Worth thinking about. But not too much, because then you just wind up with a database. Gotta leave room for the jokes. [Ernie the Attorney]