Today's trip through Wikipedia

Have you ever had the experience of looking up a word or phrase in an encyclopedia, and then, driven by curiosity and fascination, found yourself drilling down through layers of related terms, and then not knowing how you got there? Happens to me all the time, especially when I hit Wikipedia.

I was listening to a talk by Vernor Vinge on a podast series called "SALT - Seminars About Long-term Thinking". In it, he mentioned "grey goo" - a term I originally learned about from Eric Drexler's book, Engines Of Creation. So I was curious what Wiki had to say about grey goo.

I went from one topic to the next, and the next, as they were hot linked within each respective article, like this:

Grey goo ->
Ecophagy ->
Robert Freitas ->
K. Eric Drexler ->
Straw Man (a debate tactic) ->
Lemma ->
Informal Logic.

At "Informal Logic", I found a gem of information:

Opinion pieces of newspapers provide illustrative textbook examples of informal logic (Walton 1989), usually because these pieces are short and often fallacious. However, informal logic is also used to reason about events in the human and social sciences. In fact, most reasoning from known facts to unknown facts that uses natural language, even if combined with mathematical or statistical reasoning, can be regarded as an application of informal logic so long as it does not rely on additional empirical evidence.