Know your limits

For an alarming amount of day-to-day information, I rely on sequences and gimmicks intended for children. I am incapable of remembering which months have 30 days in and which 31, without running through a short rhyme in my head. The other day I even had to recite part of the alphabet song under my breath in order to find something in a glossary.

However, with some topics, I’m content with my far-from-exhaustive level of knowledge. In many cases, I know as much as I frankly need to know. While I can name all the accepted planets in the solar system, I definitely couldn’t pilot a space shuttle. That’s should be more than acceptable to most folk. 

While not an experienced plumber or electrician, I have a good understanding of how the water filter and pump in my garden pond work, and have fixed both a number of times (although I concede that only having to have fixed them once would have been more impressive). I don’t need to know anything more about bees and wasps other than to stay away from them. I can probably name about seven of the twelve disciples and am no worse off for being ignorant of the other five.

Things that don’t really matter to my day-to-day survival can happily be consigned to the realms of trivia - diverting if remembered but harmless if forgotten. It is a shame that life doesn’t give you half marks for information, admittedly (being able to list seven disciples is better than not being able to name any of them, surely?), but quite frankly it’s unlikely I’ll ever be tested on these subjects.

There are, however, aspects of your life that’s it’s bloody important to be informed about. I watched some of a show called Urban Myths Revealed this week. The spot I caught investigated the myth that a parent once came out of a supermarket and while loading their shopping into their van, paused to place the child seat containing their offspring up onto the roof of the vehicle, presumably to keep him out of harms way. They then drove home.

Some versions of the story then say the kid remained unscathed but all corroborated reports include the kid almost immediately sliding off the roof as the van accelerates, which makes the whole thing slightly less entertaining, missing that vital twist at the end that makes it so incredible. An authoritative talking head on the programme called it ‘a cautionary tale’.

Now, stop me if I’m being over-simplistic here, but if you need cautionary tales to teach you not to leave your spawn on the roof of a moving van, I would question your suitability as ideal parental material. If your intelligence level is so low that such a lesson is needed, surely you’ll not have time to raise a child – you’re going to have to spend most of your day listening to other educational stories, ones that feature parents mistakenly feeding their young ‘uns cement, or fashioning nappies out of cobras.

If you’re currently unsure as to how these particular stories are going to turn out, best avoid the more taxing aspects of existence. Accept your limitations. You don’t drive around with a toddler on your roof-rack, and I won’t pilot spacecraft.

Th’internet giveth and th’internet taketh away. th.

The internet used to be a glorious goldmine of trivia and irrelevance, magnificently random factitude and that.

Upon its arrival and subsequent global acceptance, the whole world was blessed with endless colourful nuggets of knowledge without context or reason, none of which ever made a blind iota of difference to our lives other than offering us peculiar titbits to regale each other with in the pub or place of profession. They were interesting wee bits of brainfood, and nothing else mattered.

But with the rise of Wikipedia and other such malarkey, it’s actually becoming a portal for random fact checking, rather than just random fact-dispensal. It’s depressingly easy to actually check up on the most obtusely perculiar subjects, to dismiss the credibility of one of these joyfully whimsical little footnotes with a simple flutter of keystrokes.

Rather than simply loving the randomness of a fact, or at the very least spending an entertaining but ultimately irrelevant few moments debating the credence of somebody’s new slip of trivia, you can now immediately grind them into the dirt with a casual google and destroy the pleasure of an ultimately harmless particular bit of chatter forever.

Brain coral: sushi for zombies

Of course, it’s always been possible to look things up, but the facts were much more run-of-the-mill and general, and reference sites tended to just offer up the same basic overview of nature and history as the encyclopedia britannica. There was nothing too peculiar, certainly not from a source that you’d actually hold any sway by. The oddest fact you always found was that there was a type of coral living off in the ocean somewhere, shaped like, and named after, the brain.

Now there’s so many more qualified people filling up with world-wide web with informed knowledge about overwhelmingly diverse and unusual topics, and worse, they’re starting to actually reference these little myths and murmurs, expelling them at will.

In some cases, there’s something to be said for the practise: sites like snopes, among other things, do a great job of explaining why you shouldn’t be sending on all those worthless charity chain e-mails to people who you believe still call you a friend. And in most cases, their exposing of myths and falsehoods is so well researched, you can briefly amuse yourself reading the stories of their origins. Likewise, the TV show Mythbusters puts theories to the test in such an entertaining way that you don’t begrudge the loss of the odd snippet in the slightest.

But I think there’s still something to be said for preserving the bits of information that have no bearing on our lives beyond entertainment, even if they are utter poppycock. I mean, who’s being hurt by this apparent misinformation? In coversation last week, myself and a colleague both came out with the notion that polar bears cover their noses with one paw in order to more effectively blend in with their snowy surroundings and so successfully sneak up on their prey.

One sceptic googled it.

From here: ‘One of the most persistent myths about the polar bear is that a hunting bear will cover its black nose while lying in wait for a seal.’

uh oh.

‘ Canadian biologist Ian Stirling has spent several thousand hours watching polar bears hunt. He has never seen one hide its nose, nor have other scientists.’

Boo. Perfectly lovely bit of trivia gone forever.

So I’m suggesting a new rule. If you’re going to write a website, in which you expel some wonderously innocent trivial titbit, you’re going to have to come up with something else to replace it.

So, say you denounce polar bears’ nasal cloaking device, I want you to tell me that Shakespeare invented twister. If Disney’s head ain’t frozen, then you’d better say that everyone in his version of ‘Robin Hood’ was voiced by the same two people. If you prove that Eskimos don’t have sixty-five words for ‘snow’ I want to know that Armadillos were sacred to red indians, and they believed they were a sign to ‘roll with the punches’. Tell me that spiders don’t really crawl into your mouth when you’re asleep and… well, actually I don’t mind that one not being true.