Why Guitars Are Important

If the techie-blog post I read this morning is any indication, the habituated debauchery known as Googling has been exposed, finally, to the light bulb of scientific scrutiny. To use one of the rampant colloquialisms of the cybersphere, we've been busted, and will now be forced to get our knowledge and inspiration the old-fashioned way. Not Googling was good enough for your grandmother, and if it was good enough for her grandmother's grandmother, it was certainly good enough for her mother, too. They Googled not, yet they knew things.

Another example of a person who knows things is Alex Wissner-Gross, the Harvard physicist quoted in the Times Online article quoted in the techie-blog post I mentioned before.

"Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy," he said.

Writing in the company's official blog, Google's Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Operations, agrees on the rapidity angle, but has a different idea when it comes to efficiency.

[Google has] designed and built the most energy efficient data centers in the world, which means the energy used per Google search is minimal. In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.

Urs goes on to point out that "a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds." This may be a bit on the conservative side for people like me, who routinely consume many times our own weight in delicious chocolate-covered donuts, yet remain svelte, and therefore debonair.

Nevertheless, the point remains the same, which is that we should learn to play the guitar instead of Googling stuff all the time.