Britannica und Ich

The book from A.J Jacobs (I read it in German, which was actually good for my german world pool - it is still there) is about Jacobs himself who wants to read the entire Britannica (Enzyklopedie - 33.000 pages, 65.000 articles, 24.000 pictures) to be smarter than everyone else.

While reading he discovers that intelligence consists of different parts and that just a high IQ or a lot of knowledge does not mean you will be rich or a loved personality. It is a combination of everything.

Also he mentions that every piece of knowledge is connected, a bit like XING - everyone knows everyone through 7 corners. Meaning to me the more you know the more you can connect it to other things you learn or read, which means indeed reading the Britannica is like a catalyzer for your brain. Let’s see if Jacobs gets more intelligent over time, then I maybe start reading the Brock Haus (German counter part of the Britannica).

Anyway the book is a good read (more for fun than for knowledge) and he mentioned some funny and good to know facts, eg:

Jan Fleming did not only write the Bond books but also had a life philosophy - “Say always yes to adventures otherwise you will live a dead boring life”
the marathon is 42195 meters long because the windsor castle was that far away from the queens seats in the london stadium
1883 was a massive vulcan eruption on the vulcan island krakatau, which was pretty horrible, but it created for a year the most beautiful sunsets around the world because of the new particles in the atmosphere
the Earth is not round, the earth is a bit like a egg
eggplant, at least one kind of an eggplant looks like an egg
Descartes (Cogito ergo sum) loves women with a converted look
the fregatta bird is catching fish in the air for dinner, the fish has been dropped by other flying birds, who have been terrified by them :-)
elephants sex takes 20 seconds
it is 15.000.000 degrees in the core of the sun
the light is traveling at 299.792 km/h

.... etc. why is the sky blue, when was the first stock exchange, what was the first name of the white house, what was the bernoullie energy sentence, why sandwich is named sandwich...

but he also mentioned two other things. On parable about a king who wants to have all knowledge written into a book for his child. The scholars gathered out and came back with 24 (or so) handwritten books. The king said: “That’s too much, come back when it is more compact.” The scholars came back with one book. The King said: “That’s still to much.” After a while the scholars came back with one sentence: “Everything will go by”

Another quote of the book which is quite true:

“The secrets of live cannot be learned from books"

tj