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