SimpleBlob's Life

I've burned through a lot of blog posts nowadays. Everyday I read/skimmed about 20-30 through Google rss reader, and another 5-10 through social news sites like reddit. I found that often the most thought-provoking and informative posts has no comment at all, and the opinionated, controversial posts with less substance generate an order magnitude more response.

I think this is due to the reading habit of people on the internet (myself included.)  We prefer sound-bites and clear-cut stories more than logical and fact-based ones with nuanced positions. Our brains digest them easily and yearn for more. That got me to another question: Is this the natural preference of the brain, and can we "train" the brain to like reading denser stuff?'

Recently I began reading scientific/technical papers. They are packed with concepts and information, which makes them very hard to read at the beginning. Later on, I found that the biggest reason is I don't understand a lot of words/jargons that the author used. Words are like compressed ideas. In this case, really compressed clever ideas. These papers are quite efficient at delivering information, given that you know how to decode them (knowing what all the compressed words mean.)

So I began jotting down all the terms I don't know, and google+wiki them. After that, most of the papers read like a complicated short story, though completely understandable. The funny thing is, I relax between reading sessions by browsing those blog posts.