I like marinating

Though ironically, not in cooking (it takes too much planning ahead).

Ideas sit around in my head just stewing and morphing into what becomes something coherent and then *poof!*

A paper
Blog post
Story
Realization about life

And so on.

Or something simple, like what to make for dinner.

I suppose what I've been marinating on lately is the idea of synthesis.

There is so much information out there and it's not about knowing, it's about using what is known.

Even if the information on how to make a car is all out there, with all the YouTube videos and what not, it is still up to the user/viewer/browser (or whatever you want to call the person sitting on this end of the computer) to take the information and make something of it.

I can watch 100 videos on how to make a car but I have to take that information and actually do something with it - synthesize the information into meaning.

I suppose the car example isn't the best one, but if one is looking for something on the Internet, one must sift through all the irrelevant information, find the relevant information, and then examine it to see how it fits into what one is looking for. Once all the pertinent information is found, one must synthesize the meaning of all that information into an answer.

It's very much like graduate school research, which is why I was thinking of the idea of synthesis to begin with.

I think that the humanities and its relevance is going to be making a comeback because with all the information out there, the people with the critical thinking skills will be needed to synthesize meaning out of all the information.

Just sayin'.