Offloading memory.

You may have see this cartoon making the rounds:

Maybe we should include the human brain among the aggrieved parties.

I have been racking my own dollar-store brain to remember what provider or computer outfit did the cell phone commercial some years ago in which a bunch of old guys in a bar are arguing sports trivia, and then a nerdish youth corrects them using information off his mobile phone. He astonishes the yahoos by pulling in the answers from the atmosphere. If you remember any details about it, please let me know. All I remember is that the young fellow had a face that looked like it could use a fist.

Considering today's topic, it's funny that I have not been able to find the commercial using the search engines. The problem is that all the search terms I come up with lead me to current ads and other more popular (or promoted) content. But I remember that ad, because it struck a chord. We all know that human memory plays tricks, and that the Internet contains every bit of sports trivia known to man.

When that commercial first aired, the magic of the Internet had been in play for a while, and we knew we could use it to answer all things -- but not while getting hammered at the bar. You had to use your computer to access the Internet. Sometimes buffering was involved. Prior to the information age, the bad memory of drunks was required to bring forth data -- or, for the well-prepared innkeeper, the Guinness Book of Records.

That worthy book, which became popular far beyond its humble origins (the managing director of the eponymous brewery's argument over what game bird in Europe was the fastest), was a staple in bars and homes for decades. For sports fans who liked to argue there were books like The Baseball Encyclopedia. Now, especially when Internet access is as far away as your shirt pocket, we tend to leave our memory up to the World Wide Web. Memorization is, in other words, for squares. And maybe for good reason.

"If I could remember everything I ever read," a friend once said (while drinking), "I'd be God." Exaggeration aside, I knew what he meant. It is frustrating to realize how much we forget of what we read. The joy of encountering a remembered book anew is nice, but not worth the loss of all the information that falls out of our heads when we are doing other things. I'm reading a book about the Battle of the Bulge now, one that is well researched and so contains lots of German names, and town and other place names, and I forget who and what everything is. A Generalfeldmarschall might disappear for twenty pages, and by the time he reemerges I've forgotten which one he is. I'd rather have some memory of him than have to look him up.

For so many things, memory is optional -- Dr. Internet will see you now. But even for those of us suffering from CRS, reliance on devices to inform our memories doesn't seem like a good idea. Does memory improve with training, as Harry Lorayne says? If so, we are in trouble. We're using memory less, thanks to the very devices accused of shortening our attention spans. Maybe we are getting dumber!

It doesn't help that when we do look things up, we tend to go straight to Wikipedia, which is not exactly gospel truth.

Anyway, the kid in the commercial reeling off sports trivia at the bar and annoying his elders would get his comeuppance later when he discovered another thing the smartphone was good for: drunk texting. Good luck talking to your girlfriend in the morning, bub.

History's mistorys!!!!

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I was working on a freelance project that involved research; it was feared that the author may have relied on Wikipedia too much ("too much" being "at all"). But as it was a history book, it got me thinking about history as an academic discipline.

In college I once had a psych professor who hated history, thought it was the most useless subject possible to study. I guess he was unfamiliar with the famous Santayana dictum. At least my prof admitted that he might have had some weird trauma in his past that caused him to hate history.

I love and validate the study of history. But what occurred to me while going through some period sources and academic journals is that telling the truth based on evidence is not the way to fame and fortune in the field. The best way to get fame and fortune is probably to come up with some astounding whopper and hope there's enough doubt to keep you from being exposed until you yourself are history.

For example: While Kennedy conspiracy theorists are usually relegated to the tinfoil beanie squad, Zachary Taylor assassination conspiracists are still taken seriously. Poor ol' Zach, our late 12th president, became a hot topic when historians decided he'd been killed in office not by dysentery but rather by arsenic, administered by a lethal conspiracy of shadowy pro-slavery forces. So they dug up Mr. Taylor and tested him for arsenic, and he did not have arsenic in him. You know what he had? Residency in the fever swamp of Washington, DC, in 1850. It's amazing we didn't lose a lot more presidents back then.

Anyway, using the Whopper Gambit I think I might yet become a famous historian, with my findings published in esteemed journals like the Daily Mail and Gawker. I thought I'd try out some engaging historical lies; which ones do you think might work the best?

1) Shakespeare's plays were not written by dull front man William "Willy" Shakespeare but by Elizabeth I, in her spare time. The sonnets were knocked off by a guy named Harvey Schonfeld.

2) The English never did conquer the Irish, not in the 12th century or at any other time. The English just came and started freeloading and the Irish were too polite to ask them to leave.

3) Chicago-style pizza originated when the city's Italian immigrants, denied the legal opportunity to buy pizza stones, had to steal manhole covers instead.

4) NASA only pretended to put men on the moon, as the math necessary to land on an object in geosynchronous orbit was too difficult with primitive computers. The Apollo missions instead landed on the heliocentric Mars and pretended it was the moon. That's why all those pictures are in black and white---to avoid revealing Mars's red dirt.

5) The term "OK" does not come from slang for "all correct" (or "oll korrect") or even "Old Kinderhook," Martin Van Buren's nickname, as long suspected. It actually stood for Oscar Kinkeldorf, whose restaurant in Cincinnati was just all right.

6) "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" was not written by Clement Clarke Moore, but was in fact written by a strange little woman named Dolly, who was an outcast because of her progressive thinking.

7) Genghis Khan? Actually got his start conquering as a 10-year-old girl.

8) While the Flavian Amphitheater (a.k.a. the Colosseum) was never used for mock sea battles, it was actually used as a giant salsa bowl.

Chips and circuses.

9) All of Edison's inventions were made by his secretary, Phyllis. He never gave her a raise.

10) John F. Kennedy was indeed shot on November 22, 1963, but what really killed him? Dysentery.

Resmirch.

Been working on a research project this week, mostly involving verification of another writer's work. And I have just one thought I would like to share with you today.

If you are doing schoolwork, or checking someone else's work, or writing an essay, or writing a book,

DO

                              NOT

RELY 

                                      ON 

WIKIPEDIA!!!!

Phew. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

I probably don't have to relate the problems of Wikipedia, which Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope once called "the million-monkeys-with-a-million-keyboards approach." Anyone can edit it, if he's persistent about it---even a non-tech guy like the Washington Post's Gene Weingartner, who once put a bunch of whoppers about himself on his Wikipedia page to see how long it would take for anyone to notice. (In his case, slightly more than a couple of days.)

Some of the entries are terribly written, which is the least of their problems. Many are poorly researched, and the best the editors can do is flag the page and beg the public for help. There is no standardization, not even at the level of IMDb; an article may be long and meticulously documented and researched, while another on a very similar subject may be brief, sloppy, and free of references. It also has no sense of scholarly proportion; the English language Taylor Swift page runs close to 23,000 words, with 544 footnotes (as of this morning); the article on England, about the same length, with 345 footnotes.

Having said all that, I do think there is a place for Wikipedia in research, that being as a possible jumping-off point. The pages that are properly sourced are done well, and can be a good catchall for up-to-date information. But every fact must be checked against the source, and those sources themselves can vary wildly in quality. An article on a dietary mineral may quote the Institute of Medicine and Dr. Spurious McQuack's syndicated crapfest of a TV show.

The people who write and edit Wikipedia do try, but they have neither the resources nor the focus of the World Book, let alone the Encyclopedia Britannica. All I can say is that Wikipedia itself can never be a source, and all its research must be taken with a grain of salt, which Wikipedia tells us was an ingredient in Pliny the Elder's antidote to poison.