A long article about the new twist the Internet brings into the old question of whether schoolchildren will be better off learning some general facts about history, geography, etc., or just how to use the means of finding out information when they need it.
A former winner of the BBC quiz show “Mastermind” recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers’ zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: “How did you get that?” So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head.
Is this where we are heading? A Google search, once you have keyed the words in, takes a broadband user less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. As for those laborious keystrokes, voice-recognition technology will enable us to bypass them. And soon pretty well everybody, from schoolchildren to drinkers in pubs, will be online pretty well all of the time. In that context, perhaps there is no longer any point in keeping facts in our heads. If you want to know who wrote “Skellig”, or whether Norway is a member of the European Union, or what Cary Grant’s real name was, you ask your laptop or your phone.
I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work.
When you know how to use Google, you know everything. Right?
Oh, they just wanted Americans to vote for a black man? And they don’t have a lot of black elected leaders in their own countries? Could never have guessed it from the media coverage of the election.
A study (they didn’t actually study people - they just analyzed the results of some previous studies) claims to have found that using tanning beds before age 30 increases the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent, and that all types of ultraviolet radiation (including sunlight) are carcinogenic.
We still need vitamin D, though, so any sensational claims must not scare people into hiding from the sun at all times.
Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.
Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.
This being rural India, I wonder what the upper age would generally be for a girl to still be unmarried. But hey, if it works for them…
An Israeli pilot safely lands his damaged F-15 after flying ten miles to the nearest airfield, and only then finds out that the damage includes a missing wing. That’s one well-made machine.
The journo’s name is Carol Rosenberg, from the Miami Herald, and if the claims in the complaint are true, I have no idea how someone like her can be employed as a journalist. Go here for the text of Commander Jeffrey D. Gordon’s letter to Rosenberg’s boss.
II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.
VII.2.18 (vicolo del Panattiere, House of the Vibii, Merchants); 3117: Atimetus got me pregnant.
Because it will end the American middle-class lifestyle that you dumb, insensitive fly-over trash think you have the right to choose. The sophisticated, benevolent elite has a better life designed for you: you’ll be packed densely into cities with public transportation instead of cars, walking off those pounds to and from work while giving Gaia a breather, and the SUV will be eliminated as a class. All they have to do to force you into their paradise is make gas expensive enough - which, with things like cap-and-tax and no offshore drilling allowed, is just a matter of time.
Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother) believes that Britain is worse off as a result of the Soviet empire’s collapse. I doubt that Britain’s Left would have been defeated for good if the wall had stood, but I don’t know British politics half as well as Hitchens does.
When you are a Democratic president and even the Washington Post says you are a second coming of Jimmy Carter, you know you aren’t doing tremendously well: “What’s Next, Mr. President — Cardigans?”.
But not because the Chinese government has suddenly accepted that people should be free to have as many children as they want. It’s simply that after 30 years of effectively forbidding its people from having more than one child, China has woken up to the looming demographic crisis and shortage of workers. So they are now actively encouraging couples to have two children, trying the new policy in Shanghai for now.
