I keep thinking about technology and magic. Whenever I drive into the city, I look at everyone else sailing in on four lane freeways, focussed on their destination. But how amazing it is that we get there at all, propelled along by small explosions contained in a metal vessel. And how bizarre it is that I have no real idea how a car works. Sure, I know broad strokes, but ask me, or most of us, in detail, and we'll falter. All we really know is that it works, and when it doesn't work, it can be fixed by showering it with money. It's really a modern form of magic, a wonderful magic that lets us get places quickly. We use it, but the magicians make it. There are a very few who understand how cars work, because it's either their job or their passion to. Mechanics, designers, petrolheads - these people understand the magic, the details, the brilliance of the engineering. It's the same with the internet, and computers. Computer geeks have their own languages to describe the arcane environments they both create and live within. For that matter, so do the magicians within any tech speciality; mining, economic modelling, military, space exploration, biotech. And we, the users, the worshippers, the unknowing give thanks that it works. It's amazing, really. Despite all the democratizing of knowledge through the printing press, radio, libraries and more recently, the internet, knowledge has expanded outwards in dizzying, exponential spirals, faster and faster, causing niche knowledge and tech specialities to multiply like isolated colonies. Sure, people have tried to buck the trend and talk across specialities, across magic realms - the genre of popular science is the best known example -but even popular science is based on ideas, not practicality. It's a little scary, but a little exciting at the same time. What a strange phenomenon, though - it's not that the knowledge doesn't exist, the problem of the past, but that we can't access it or understand it readily enough. It exists, but in strange forms requiring indoctrination, training, a community.