It is already week 3 of class and I have come to realize that I start to blog as soon as something really pops off the page to me. Five pages into reading “Economics and Attention” by Richard Lanham and this quote by Lantham, about his dad really stuck out to me :

“You’ve got to dig it, grow it or build it; everything else is just fluff.” Lanham goes on to add, “So there you have the three stages of economy, redefined: Agricultural, industrial, fluff.”

I truly agree with this statement. The energy needed to heat my house was dug, the food I eat is grown and my house was built. The pen that I would have written this on paper, both come from the ground and are grown [coal and trees]. The lettuce on my sandwich for lunch was grown in the ground on a field far away. Someone had to build the chair I’m sitting in while I write this blog. Everything else is just fluff.

“Trying to fathom the mind of God”

I concur with how society is trying to ‘play God’ by creating artificial life by evolving biological systems within a computer. I believe that we are not here by means of evolution from a monkey. I believe that a God created this entire world and all the animals in it, including us. The fact that scientists are trying to restructure an artificial heart is astounding! They have succeeded, but nothing is as perfect as God, the creator, fathomed and created it. I am all for artificial research, for I know it could come to the point where I need an artificial limb or heart when I get older; the work they do in recreating this is beautiful, but nothing is as beautiful as the mastered, biological, physical heart which beats life into every single human being. Lanham ends this segment with “trying to fathom the mind of God has proved to be harder than kicking the stone.”

“Intellectual Property”

I found this little section to spur a great deal of thought and response. As a product designer, I know that my future beholds many random inventions and ideas that are my ‘property’. I find that intellectual property, now-a-days, is the most important property to have the rights to. To be able to harbor the information of the newest technology, to be able to say that you’re the first who ever thought of a great idea, even so that the cure for cancer is probably already known, in someone’s mind or on paper, being tested for certain right now. This cure is intellectual property. How much is this worth? How is it kept copyrighted? I like how Lanham stated that as long as due credit is given, ideas can be built upon and made better.

In all, this blog is very random with a few sections pertaining to specified sections of the given text. My blogs shall not be like their normally. Next week I shall have more order and congruity. For now though,these are my thoughts, these are my ideas, and this is my blog.  Now I’m just trying to fluff up the stuff I’m trying to say and add my fluff to the stuff I just read. I couldn’t think of a better way to end this blog then with one of Lanham’s last quotes in the first chapter:

“We must understand better than we do now the paradoxical relationship between things and what we think about things.”

Ps. Most of this blog is fluff. Really though, who decides what is actual content (Stuff) and what is just rambling (Fluff)?