mengwong - Has the Internet has passed the da Vinci point?

It is said that Leonardo da Vinci was the last man who knew everything there was to know. After da Vinci, thanks to the Renaissance which he personified, the efflorescence of human knowledge outpaced any one individual's ability to understand it all.

I believe the Internet has now reached that point. I'm not talking about what's on the Internet: as a mirror of human knowledge (no matter how imperfect) it has already exceeded several human lifetimes.

I'm talking specifically about Internet technologies.

Suppose you ...

... gave a month each to algorithms and complexity theory, SQL and database theory, C and programming language theory, Java and compiler theory, and to learning C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, .NET, ActionScript, JavaScript, LISP, ML, and Haskell,

... spent week or a day each exploring Amazon EC2, S3, SQS, WebDAV, Firefox, Emacs, vi, Photoshop, Illustrator, Google, Yahoo, TCP/IP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, DNS, SSL, HTTPS, OpenID, CPAN, Wikipedia, Rubyforge,

... took an hour each to learn AIM, Google Docs, Google Earth, OmniOutliner, Quicksilver, Skype, LiveJournal, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Meebo,

... wasted a minute each on the onion, lolcats, xkcd, married to the sea, homestar runner, leekspin, kawaii, and every other funny fad,

and so on,

If you a spent a year this way, i wager that the number of new technologies, fads, must-see websites, and applications that appeared during that year would take you more than a year to catch up on.

Okay. Maybe this isn't true right now. Undergrads manage to cram it all into 4 years somehow.

Maybe I'm just feeling old.

Maybe I'm looking guiltily at the copy of FSTR that I haven't had time to read yet.

But even if it isn't true today, it'll be true by Dec 21 2012 :)