There’s an old analogy toa cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old teathat’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess.Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learnsomething about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it.It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cupthinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new,because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entrybecause you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never reallytried anything new… on and on in an endless circular pattern.

The reason Phædrus usedslips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray fullof slips provides a more random access. When information is organized in smallchunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much morevaluable than when you have to take it in serial form. It’s better, forexample, to run a post office where the patrons have numbered boxes and cancome in to access these boxes any time they please. It’s worse to have them allcome in at a certain time, stand in a queue and get their mail from Joe, whohas to sort through everything alphabetically each time and who has rheumatism,is going to retire in a few years, and who doesn’t care whether they likewaiting or not. When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential formatit develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and whatwill not, and that rigidity is deadly.

Some of the slips wereactually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closelyrelated. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells,