Food for thought

Libraries are wonderful places, like free Internet cafés with ambiance. Yet while their attendance may be in decline, it would be unfair to label them extinct, per se. That said I still can’t recall the last time I actually went to a library to check out a book.

So goes the story of how Internet killed the pillar of academia: while my lust for knowledge is as perverse as the next grad student’s, I no longer have to brave the Seattle rain to get my fix, and that’s fine by me. For years the Internet has provided my intellectual sustenance, and of all the myriad means of keeping my frontal lobe fat and happy, none holds the promise of countless hours of binging quite like the eternal buffet that is Wikipedia.

Food, appropriately enough, is usually what gets me started. I’ll have eaten a bowl of coconut ice cream, say, and an hour later I’ll be whipping out goodies like the definition of endosperm (the classification for coconut meat) for whomever can stomach it. I may be the only man in existence to memorize the entire corporate structure of Mars, Inc. because I happened to spy an enticing candy wrapper at the supermarket.

Which isn’t to say my hunger for knowledge ends at the gustatory—far from it. I may come for the food, but I stay for the company: corporate histories, author biographies, computer game physics engine specifications. It seems no data nugget is too trivial for consumption (I’m having way too much fun with this), much to the aid of my Jeopardy game. Such vast stores of knowledge must be treated with care, however: in the real world shouting out answers in the form of a question (”What is endosperm!?”) just makes you the know-it-all no one wants around, and you don’t even get paid for it.

I would be lying to say the weeks of life lost to a web of expendable intelligence was all Wikipedia’s fault. It’s just mostly its fault. You see, it’s those damn “wiki words”—the linked words and phrases in one article which lead to more articles filled with still more links. Chalking it up to increased accessibility and ease of navigation, the folks at Wikipedia are really creating a black hole where downtime goes to die.

The way I see it, there’s only one way to escape the gravitational hold of Wikipedia before I start losing friends: Jeopardy, here I come.

photo credit: throwthedamnthing