Things I Learned This Week

I have a new friend who's been an air traffic controller and is a pilot and I learned a ton about how you they communicate with planes close to the airport, between airports, on landing, etc. from him this week. When I flew down to Atlanta recently, I listened to the audio channel that United features with the pilots talking to air traffic people and I wanted to know more about it. Of course, there's tons of information on the net about it and I could have decided to look it up, but it wasn't interesting to me until I met someone who knew about it and could tell it to me in a personal way.

To rely on personal contact to spur your learning or curiosity seems a haphazard way to increase your knowledge, but it happens all the time in our lives once we are out of school. These days however, blogs are doing just that -- making a wide range of subjects interesting, engaging, accessible and fascinating simply by the fact that you sense an intimate connection and a personal voice at the other end of the information.