When I first decided to start a blog in the summer of 2007–mostly as a tactic to avoid calling the dozen friends and family-members who wanted regular updates on my life at college–I wanted a title that explained what I think the purpose of a blog is. To me, every post is a small, detailed investigation into a larger issue. My categories at the time (Human Rights, Carnegie Mellon News, Arab Issues, Abortion) are all complex and too big for a single post. But after a while, if you read everything I’ve written about Fair Use you’ll get an idea of the topic’s curves and crannies.
This reminded me of the old story of the 3 blind men and the elephant.
Here is a less clinical description.
Feeling elephants = trying to understand a complex subject one post at a time!
Somewhere in your blog (I looked for where you said that, commenting as I went along, but I failed to find that quote), you said that you really liked to, or at least had a tendency to, really focus on one small part of a project and learn it really well and thoroughly. That fits perfectly with the Feeling Elephants story. I think it was Emerson who suggested that in order to understand the universe, that one should learn everything one could about one thing.
I agree Chris–Thank you.