Googling To Distraction
As I was working on my book yesterday, I came upon the need to find out what a welder's helmet was called. I was trying to use a reference to it in a chapter, and wanted to find out if there were other, perhaps better or more eloquent terms for it. In so doing, I wandered into an article that told about retinal flash burn. Evidently this is the condition you get if you look at the flame of the welder without the protection of said helmet. Well that's great, but that's not something I wanted to know. I stumbled upon it in doing a Google search for welder's helmet. So now I know more about welding than I did yesterday. Go figure. I tell this story because it illustrates how easily we get distracted in this day and age of technology. Google (and the web) have made us easily distracted. Fifteen years ago, I would have had to look something like that up in the dictionary or, more likely, I would have just left the description at "welder's helmet" rather th...