That isn't quite right. It isn't like looking at art floods me with strange emotions of bygone era. In my experience I do not get new emotions from art. Instead art brings out the emotions from memories I already have. When I see a happy campfire scene I am not suddenly filled with happiness from some random source, I am full of the happiness I've felt during all the campfires I've sat around with friends. I would say more accurately that art triggers emotions which are already in you because you have already experienced them.

This seems better and more accurate. But if art is merely the spark of emotion, then obviously there must be something already within the viewer to set aflame.

Some might argue that everybody may equally experience art since the emotion is always there, ready to be tapped. For is not every person able to experience the same range of emotions? While I must agree that every person is capable of experiencing the same range of emotions and must further agree that the emotions exist as part of the normal development, I disagree that everybody is equally able of experiencing art. It is not the emotion, but the connection between the emotion and the art stimulus which is critical to experiencing the full emotional power of art.

If we assume that these connections are important, then the world of art becomes clear. It becomes easy to understand why the great works of art fail to impress the general public. The general public no longer has the cultural connections to the art which existed when they were new. People no longer walk on the beach with suits and parasols. And yet the art buffs and critics have put forward the effort to understand the cultural connections so that they may experience the art.

It also becomes easy to see why older people enjoy and collect more art. The older you get the more life experience you earn, the more emotional connections you create. It is foolish to expect children to fully understand and experience the emotions implicit in a young boy and young girl holding hands and walking down a dirt road. And yet to seniors such a scene holds many powerful memories and emotions of first love and youth.

Finally, it becomes obvious why people create art. Art holds the power to bring to the forefront the emotions of a whole series of memories all at once. This creates a powerful and complex emotional mix. As we forget the negative memories the positive emotions stand out stronger.

The important message to understand with art is that even if the art doesn't change, it gets better with age and exposure. It is also important to not expect the young or inexperienced to truly appreciate art. To appreciate art requires life experience.

Take your mental image and look at the book you are reading. Is that book some heavy fifteen hundred page monstrosity or is it a nice light pocket book? Is it some middle ground? Unless you are a glutton for punishment I would expect that you are not choosing to read the immense book under the tree and that you are doing this for more than just weight reasons.

In the not too distant past books where, in general, shorter. This doesn't mean that they contained less, just that they were concise. This is in part because before the advent of mass production of books printing large books was expensive and before the advent of computers writing large volumes of text was difficult. Who wants to handwrite the equivalent of fifteen hundred typed pages several times over while producing the manuscript? Now these limitations on book size haven't been an issue for several decades, but as with everything with a cultural component there was a lag before large books were accepted.

Unfortunately large books are not only accepted where they are necessary, but the size of a book has become synonymous with the quality of that book. This is an unfortunate aspect of the bigger is better phenomenon. There is the additional aspect of laziness on the part of readers these days. It is generally expected that comprehending a passage should take only minimal mental effort and study. In the past this was not the and you are probably aware of the image of learned men pouring over small volumes for weeks at a time.

Through my education I've come to realize two important things about reading books. The first is that any idea can be explained in any number of words or symbols, from incredibly dense mathematical notations to long wordy chapters. Orthogonal to the number of words used to describe the concept is the mental effort and time required to understand the concept. Given identical amounts of context a concept requires an identical mental effort to understand irrespective of the density of the explanation. This is not to say that the number of words does not matter. Too few and much time is wasted deciphering. Too many and much time is wasted condensing.

The second thing I have learnt about books is that being concise and useful requires focus and skill on the part of the writer and patience on the part of the reader. A writer must resist the temptation to repeat themselves and the reader must understand this and have the discipline to start at the beginning.

It is truly the concise books which add the most value to our lives. The long fantasy epic may provide many hours of frantic reading, but the pocket novel provides a pleasant, relaxing read. Even more so the short story provides thoughtful entertainment in time to wait for the bus. The difference is even greater when it comes to scholastic texts. The immense tomes of science and mathematics are often more confusing and less suitable for in depth study then the slim, focused texts.

The more I look at the world the more I believe that less is the answer, not more.

Well, this is where I find myself. I have no trouble finding words to write with, but the topic has been eluding me for a little over a week now. It's also not that I don't have anything to write about. I have a couple of topics which I will write about sooner than later, they just aren't done percolating yet.

So what to do then? Give up on writing to the world semi-regularly? Write about the inane things that happen in my life, such as the fact that I've recently seen a store in a mall which sells nothing but toilets. Or do I head into obscure topics which fall flat even with my geekiest friends? I'm really not sure and that's why you get a small, boring post on how I am unable to write anything interesting.

I would like to promote the idea of buy once environmentalism. The theory is simple: buy an item as few times as possible. Do not buy a new computer every year, do not buy something you are already planning no throwing away. Instead buy durable and repairable goods.

The industrial production system requires large amounts of energy, materials and produces large amounts of waste and pollution for every object which is manufactured. The difference in environmental costs between a single well made item and a cheaply made alternative is not large. However, the well made car, fridge, computer, can opener will outlast several of the cheap equivalents. This is obviously a net win for the environment.

There is an old saying which is relevant: A rich man buys a pair of boots for $100 dollars and has dry, warm feet for a decade. A poor man buys a pair of boots for $50 and has wet, cold feet for six months.

Buy once environmentalism is not only environmentally sound, it is also cheaper. So buy once.

Later on, with the invention of agriculture and specialization, identity became a little bit more complicated. In addition to who you are where you live and your profession became important. In fact the profession became so important that it became part of a person's name. No longer was John sufficient, instead it was John Smith of the village of Foo.

Though this is more complicated than the simplest form of identity, it isn't near as complicated as identity was about to become. As villages became towns and towns became cities the law increased in complexity and the concept of identity followed suit. At some point identity split into two component: legal identity and natural identity. Natural identity remained, for a time, at one's name and profession and source town. Legal identity also started out in this way, but quickly added proof of identification, such as a signature or wax seal.

From here identity only got more complicated. Natural identity expanded to include all the goods and services and distinctions which expanding wealth allowed. These components had always been there but, as with location in the beginning, so few people travelled far enough for the distinctions to become obvious. Natural identity has expanded until it has reached the current state where who you are to real people is a composite of what you look like, which music you listen to, what you drive, where you live, what you wear, your profession, your personality, your interests and those sorts of things.

Unfortunately the growth of legal identity is not so simple or clear cut. As time and technology and the complexity of the legal system increased the simple legal identity of a name and a signature became insufficient. Fraud became too prevalent and coordination between groups became necessary to the industrial legal system. It used to be that you would only deal with businesses within your local community. As long as you did this then your legal identity could be simple because it was closely tied to your natural identity. However, the industrialization of the legal system required a strict separation of these two forms of identity.

Consequently legal identity became the enormous, contradictory monstrosity it is today. A complex and fragile system of numbers and accounts spread across hundreds of organizations now defines a legal entity. This system groans under its own weight and complexity. It both stifles freedom by being inflexible and grants freedom through easy theft. The fragility of this system is the reason identity fraud is so simple and easy. There are too many numbers needed on part of the time to create new numbers tied to this amorphous legal identity but controlled by criminals.

There is hope however. We have today the tools necessary to reconstruct the legal identity system in a way which is simpler, more robust, more flexible and more secure. There are only three obstacles which stand in the way of public key cryptology from reforming legal identity. These are inertia, the legal system and the police state.

The latter is reason enough to prevent such a reform. Conveniently the former two are obstacles of sufficient strength as to likely be insurmountable. Sometimes imperfection is the correct solution.