The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradua… - Douglas Hofstadter

It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.

It is numbers like 545 billion that we are dealing with when we talk about a Defense Department overrun of $750 billion for the next four years. A really fancy single-user computer (the kind I wouldn’t mind having) costs approximately $75,000. With $750 billion to throw around, we could give one to every person in New York City, which is to say, we could buy about ten million of them. Or, we could give $1 million to every person in San Francisco, and still have enough left over to buy a bicycle for everyone in China! There’s no telling what good uses we could put $750 billion to. But instead, it will go into bullets and tanks and fighters and war games and missile systems and jet fuel and marching bands and so on. An interesting way to spend $750 billion, but I can think of better ways.

At the outset, there is a concrete situation with concrete components, and thus it is perceived as something unique and cleanly separable from the rest of the world. After a while, though — perhaps a day later, perhaps a year — one runs into another situation that one finds to be similar, and a link is made.