GPS? Or Wall-E?

So I was thinking about GPS today, and then I was thinking about that (average, at best) movie Wall-E, in which humans have placed themselves so deeply in dependance on technology that they just lie around all day drinking smoothies. While there are a lot of obvious advantages to being fed all the time without even having to lift a finger (I can see the advantages, anyway...), there are obvious downsides as well. Remember when we used to just remember all of our phone numbers? I could rattle off pretty much every friend/acquaintance/family member's phone number. Not because I wanted to, or because I was cool, but because I was too lazy to want to have to look the things up every time I needed to call anyone. Now I can barely remember my own number, let alone of those I call very frequently. Sure, I recognize them when they pop up on my phone's caller ID, but that's hardly even important, since my phone also knows who's calling.

So do I really want to cripple my already-mushy brain by removing yet another burden from the multi-system subtexting that still goes on, in an at least limited way? Or do I skip the GPS, suck up getting lost a bit more often than would be ideal, and ward off alzheimers and other brain-degenerating diseases for a few more years? Just a thought. No need to comment...

Speaking of comments, nobody was bold enough to venture a guess as to which beans are which in the previous post, so here's the key: the darkest beans are, not surprisingly, Starbuck's "medium-roast" beans, and those are located on the far left of the photo; next (in the picture) come Archer Farms "light roast," and those are roasted slightly lighter than the Spotlight beans, whose roast is undeclared. Finally, the lightest roast, and the beans on the far right, are the NovoDia Supremo beans. Get some at TJMaxx for $10/kg! They're pretty rad, for the price.

Finally, please notify your local colleges and universities that I'm not going to be on the market forever, and if I end up in an awesome tenure-track job right out of grad school, I'm unlikely to be on the market again. Ever. So your opportunity to have a world-class expert on many things that some people might be interested to know is rapidly slipping away. I'm just saying...

Happy 2011, just a couple weeks late!