Information Age...

This past weekend I went on a field trip with the geology department to an abandoned civil war era coal mine to dig for fossil from the Pennsylvanian time period. While there i found an encrusted piece of rust that from my amateur opinion could be an old 19th century pocket knife. When I got back to Erie, I quickly searched the Internet for ways to remove rust from objects and stumbled upon this.
http://users.eastlink.ca/~pspencer/nsaeta/electrolysis.html
This link describes a way to use electrolysis to remove the iron oxide from the material and convert it back into iron. This is a way of restoring antique objects.

What came to my attention after sitting for a while, I began thinking how amazing it is to be able to find random tidbits of information about obscure topics in today's age. What would have taken days of research 15 years ago, was 15 minutes today. Although in previous postings I have ranted about the dangers of mass information, there is a positive side to this issue. Our society now has the ability to gain massive amounts of information in a very short time period on any number of topics. This information can be diluted by media establishments, but the information posted not through this outlet can be very informative, geared for a very select subsection of our society. The Internet has allowed this selective information to be distributed to those who have a desire to look. This is in my opinion the true value to the Internet, the ability to disseminate large quantities of information quickly and to whoever has an interest. This characteristic of the Internet allows those with little formal education to become improve themselves in a very cheap manner.