Meaningful Technology

A fellow PhD student and I recently shared some thoughts about the grad student life. There are so many distractions available to us that it is difficult to get focused. There is so much compelling content on the Internet that I have to wonder how many millions of hours of time has been wasted in meaningless activities. For example, I once spent the better half of a weekday afternoon watching zombie movie clips. Film has a way of sucking you in completely. The experience of film and especially a story is that you escape from your present world and dive into make-believe. Over and over, I saw the typical zombie scenes: protagonists desperately fighting off zombies, hapless victims getting torn apart, zombies chewing on human flesh, etc ad nauseam.

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