DrewsBox

Lately I’ve been seeing the phrase “Tabula Rasa” pop up in seemingly unrelated aspects of my day to day. Not too long ago there was a promising MMORPG released with this particular phrase as it’s title. While I watched season one of Lost I noticed the third episode’s title was also Tabula Rasa. And now, while I am developing the theme for this very blog, my book by Packt Publishing has a chapter named as this curious phrase.

[smartads]

Since I was already at my computer, I let my curiosity get the best of me. Besides, since when do I need an exuse to hit up Wikipedia? Turns out the phrase is Latin for “blank state” and refers to the theory that humans are born with no mental content and are, essentially, blank. I won’t go in to details, you can read them here on Wikipedia.

So it all makes sense to me now. I assume the video game Tabula Rasa has a theme relating to this theory. The episode of Lost titled Tabula Rasa was the episode in which the survivors of the plane crash came to the realization that they would have to start over and learn how to live on an island. My book on WordPress theme building is probably the most fitting use of the phrase, referring to an empty blog who’s…

“entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from [it's] experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world”

So here is my first post toward the opposite of Tabula Rasa for my blog. I hope to grow this blog into a useful resource for other web enthusiasts, programmers, and designers.

Ps.  I particularly like the Tabula Rasa theory because it defies John Locke’s idea of Innatism. Take that Mr. Meyer!