Thanks to google reader and a couple of blogs I follow, the following two items (and all they represent) are creating deep cognitive dissonance within me:

The internet in 2015 (which, being entirely graphic in nature, needs to be seen)
and
Galactic-Scale Energy: “This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates—even within familiar timescales.”

I have to say that I place far more stock in the latter than in the former. There will probably be an internet in 2015 (a mere four years away), but much beyond that, I seriously doubt. Yet, in the past several months, we moved thousands of bound volumes of periodicals out of the library because the same content is, right now and perhaps for the foreseeable future, available much more conveniently through the trusted journal archive, JSTOR. It was my job to identify and verify the volumes that could be recycled. Each moment of the several weeks I worked on that, I doubted the very-long-term wisdom of doing so. Yet at the same time, I could understand that in the age past the internet, the likelihood that there will be students and faculty needing to use the kind of information that is epitomized in German studies review or Dante studies is remote.