Word: trivia
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...talk about animals is a step toward self-knowledge. "We Homo sapiens," Holmes writes, "so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own species to paper." Holmes describes us quite wonderfully, and she's a tireless compiler of biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore no more than a loose animal skin even in sleet and snow, and the Yana Indians of California, whose men and women speak different dialects. She has an engaging...
Social-networking websites may have started out as online cliques where friends could swap opinions on music, pop culture and other bits of innocuous personal trivia. But as the conflict in Gaza has unfolded, it's becoming evident that sites like Facebook are increasingly being used to express political views, adding an acrimonious, even menacing undertone to what were once lighthearted online forums...
...surface, this seems to make sense. With so much information readily accessible, why waste mental space on facts like the population of Russia or the circumference of a circle? Humans have limited mental capacity. Even Sherlock Holmes had to purge his mind of random trivia occasionally to make room for more important matters. Rote memorization, long a mainstay of the classroom, is now relegated to Classics concentrators and those people who play online trivia games for fun. For the first time in centuries, humans can store all those pesky facts on Wikipedia and devote their entire minds to thinking...
...Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible. Some information is important and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other...
...Sopranos: The Complete Series It won't tell you whether Tony got whacked (which you might expect for $400 a pop). But this definitive collection of HBO's definitive drama offers such extras as Q&As with creator David Chase and two trivia-filled cast roundtables held, natch, over dinner...