Reinventing the encyclopedia game Rives

so last month the Encyclopedia

Britannica announced that it is going

out of print after two hundred and

forty-four years which made me nostalgic

because i remember playing a game with

the colossal encyclopedia set in my

hometown library back when I was a kid

maybe 12 years old and I wondered if I

could update that game not just for

modern methods but for the modern me so

I tried I went to an online encyclopedia

Wikipedia and i entered the term earth

you can start anywhere this time I chose

earth and the first rule of the game is

pretty simple you just have to read the

article until you find something you

don’t know and preferably something your

dad doesn’t even know and in this case I

quickly found this the furthest point

from the center of the earth is not the

tip of Mount Everest like I might have

thought it’s the tip of this mountain

Mount chimborazo in Ecuador the Earth

spins of course is it travels around the

Sun so the earth bulges a little bit

around the middle like some earthlings

and even though Mount chimborazo isn’t

the tallest mountain in the Andes it’s

one degree away from the equator it’s

riding that bulge and so the summit of

Chimborazo is the furthest point on

earth from the center of the earth and

it is really fun to say so I immediately

decided this is going to be the name of

the game or my new exclamation you could

use it at Ted chimborazo right it’s like

Eureka and bingo had a baby I didn’t

know that that’s pretty cool Chimborazo

so the next rule the game is also pretty

simple you just have to find another

term and look that up now in the old

days that meant getting out of volume

and browsing through it alphabetically

maybe get inside track that was fun

nowadays there are hundreds of links to

choose room I can go literally anywhere

in the world I think since I was already

in Ecuador I just decided to click on

the word tropical that took me to this

you know wet and warm band of the

tropics that encircles the earth now

that’s the Tropic of Cancer on the north

and the Tropic of Capricorn the South

that much I knew but I was surprised to

learn this

those are not cartographers lines

like you know latitude or the borders

between nations they are astronomical

phenomenon caused by the earth tilt and

they change they move they go up they go

down in fact for years the tropic of

cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have

been steadily drifting towards the

equator at the rate of about 15 meters

per year and nobody told me that I

didn’t know it Chimborazo right so to

keep the game going I just have to find

another term and look that one up since

I’m already in the tropics I chose

tropical rainforests famous for its

diversity human diversity there are

still dozens and dozens of uncontacted

tribes living on this planet they’re all

over the globe but virtually all of them

live in tropical rainforests this is the

only place you can go nowadays and not

get you know friended right the link

that I clicked on here was well it’s

exotic in the beginning and then

absolutely mysterious at the very end it

mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coati

s and poison dart frogs and boa

constrictors and then coleoptera which

turn out to be Beatles now I clicked on

this on purpose but if I’d somehow

gotten here by mistake it does remind me

you know for the band see the Beatles

for the cars and volkswagen beetle but I

am here for beetle beetles this is the

most successful order on the planet by

far something between 20 and 25 percent

of all life forms on the planet

including plants are beetles that means

the next time you were in the grocery

store take a look at the four people

ahead of you in line statistically one

of you is a beetle and

if it is you you are astonishingly well

adapted their our scavenger beetles that

pic the skin and flesh off of bones and

museums there are predator beetles that

attack other insects and still look

pretty cute to us there are beetles that

roll little balls of dung great

distances across the desert floor to

feed to their hatchlings this reminded

the ancient Egyptians of their God

Khepri who renews the ball of the Sun

every morning which is how that dung

rolling scarab became that sacred scarab

on the breastplate of the pharaoh

tutankhamun beetles I was reminded have

the most romantic flirtation in the

animal kingdom fireflies are not flies

fireflies or beetles fireflies are

coleoptera and coleoptera communicate in

other ways as well like my next link the

chemical language of pheromones now the

pheromone page took me to a video of a

sea urchin having sex yeah

and the link to aphrodisiac now that’s

something that increases sexual desire

possibly chocolate there is a compound

in chocolate called phenylethylamine

that might be an aphrodisiac but as the

article mentions because of enzyme

breakdown it’s unlikely that

phenylethylamine will reach your brain

if taken orally so those of you who only

eat your chocolate you might have to

experiment and the link i click on here

sympathetic magic mostly because i

understand what both of those words mean

but not when they’re together like that

I do like sympathy I do like magic so

when I click on sympathetic magic I get

sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls this

is the boy in me getting lucky again

right except that magic is imitation if

you imitate something maybe you can have

an effect on it that’s the idea behind

voodoo dolls and possibly also cave

paintings the link to cave paintings

takes me to some of the oldest art known

to humankind I would love to see google

maps inside some of these caves right

we’ve got tens of thousand years old

artwork common themes around the globe

include large wild animals and tracings

of human hands usually the left hand we

have been a dominantly right-handed

tribe for millennia so even though i

don’t know why a Paleolithic person

would trace his hand or blow pigment on

it from a tube I can easily picture how

we did it and I really don’t think it’s

that different from our own little

dominant hand avatar right there that

i’m gonna use now to click on the term

for hand go to the page for hand where I

found the most fun and possibly

embarrassing bit of trivia I found in a

long time it’s simply this the back of

the hand is formally called the ax

piston are now that’s embarrassing

because up until now every time I’ve

said I know it like the back of my hand

I’ve really been saying I’m totally

familiar with that I just don’t know

it’s freaking name right um

and the link i clicked on here well

lemurs monkeys and chimpanzees have the

little a piston are i click on

chimpanzee and i get our closest genetic

relative pan troglodytes the name we

give him means cave dweller he doesn’t

he lives in rainforests in Savannah’s

it’s just that we’re always thinking of

this guy is lagging behind us

evolutionarily or somehow uncannily

creeping up on us and in some cases he

gets places before us like my next link

the almost irresistible link ham the

Astro chimp i click on him I really

thought he was gonna bring me full

circle twice in fact he’s born in

Cameroon which is smack in the middle of

my tropics map and more specifically his

skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian

Museum getting picked clean by beetles

in between those two landmarks in ham’s

life he flew into space he experienced

weightlessness and re-entry months

before the first human being to do it

Soviet cosmonaut yuri gagarin when i

click on you in agra gardens page i get

this guy who was surprisingly short in

stature huge and heroism top estimates

soviet estimates put this guy at 1.65

meters that is you know less than five

and a half feet tall max possibly

because he was malnourished as a child

Germans occupied Russia a Nazi officer

took over the Gagarin household and he’d

his family built and lived in a mud hut

years later the boy from that cramped

mud hut would grow up to be the man in

that cramped capsule on the tip of a

rocket who volunteered to be launched

into outer space the first one of any of

us to really physically leave this

planet he didn’t just leave it he

circled it once fifty years later as a

tribute the International Space Station

which is still up there tonight synced

its orbit with Gardens orbit at the

exact same time of day and filmed it so

you can go online and you can watch over

100 minutes of what must have been an

absolutely mesmerizing ride possibly a

lonely one the fur

person to ever see such a thing and then

when you’ve had your fill of that you

can click on one more link you can come

back to earth return to where you

started you can finish your game you

just need to find one more fact that you

didn’t know and for me I quickly landed

on this one the earth has a tolerance of

a point seventeen percent from the

reference spheroid which is less than

the point twenty two percent allowed in

billiard balls this is the kind of fact

I would have loved as a boy I found it

myself it’s got some math that I can do

I’m pretty sure my dad doesn’t know it

right what this means is that if you

could shrink the earth to the size of a

bigger ball right if you could take

planet Earth with all its mountaintops

and caves and rainforests astronauts and

uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees

voodoo dolls fireflies chocolate sea

creatures making love and the deep blue

sea you shrink that to the size of a

billiard ball it would be as smooth as a

billiard ball presumably a billiard ball

with a slight bulge around the middle

that’s pretty cool I didn’t know that

Chimborazo thank you

you