The Thinkery

by Ryan

Aristophanies may very well be the perfect Ancient Greek blogger. Okay, so I just made that up. He was an interesting person nonetheless, and his play Clouds is the inspiration for this post. But before we get to that, here's the basic gist of the play:

Man is losing money because his son loves horseracing. He owes creditors money and decides the best thing to do is learn from Socrates how to disprove them using speech. He goes to Socrates' "Thinkery" and asks to learn. He sucks at it and decides his son should go and learn instead. He does. However, Socrates offers two different types of speech, "Just" and "Unjust", both of which have their benefits. The old man's son learns "Unjust" speech and the old man gets angry, beaten up, and decides the best thing to do is burn down the Thinkery.

And scene.

Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with much of anything, aside from the fact that I thought "The Thinkery" sounds really cool. That's an underrated term right there. The more I thought about it I was reminded of a comment made by Chuck Klosterman a few weeks ago. The link seems to be down right now, but the basic idea is that blogs should do a lot of statistical research because they have the ability to do so. There are plenty of people trying to be funny or analyze the same thing, so why not do some heavy duty number crunching to distance yourself?

That's not a bad idea if you ask me, but it may lead down an interesting road. Much like "Just" and "Unjust" speech in Clouds, there are some very useful statistics out there, and there are some very bad ones. So, what kinds of things should we look at? We already have some... interesting ideas, but I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of things you want us to look at.

Any ideas? Is this even worth looking into? These posts will be time consuming so I can't promise anything more than one per week, but I'm willing to put in the time if people would enjoy them.

Either way, one such post will be coming soon, and if you have any suggestions, we are all ears.