Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Useless Knowledge

Think about vast amount of knowledge we collect each and every day from the moment of our birth. Some of it has practical purpose; some of it is being used once in a while and some is just lurking way in the background never being recalled. Is there such a thing as useless knowledge? It seems like knowledge that doesn’t have any practical purpose or doesn’t bring pleasure can be easily dumped in that category. Easy, no? My husband’s example of useless knowledge was a telephone number of one of the places he once rented. He still remembers it but cannot recall even location of the apartment. My older son came up with, “The memory span of gold fish is three minutes.” The younger one insisted that every bits of knowledge were useful given the right circumstances. I also appeared to be having the hardest time to file any knowledge as useless mostly because odd facts delight me. For example, this little bit about a gold fish is amusing to me. And, if someone does decide to teach a gold fish new tricks he can save himself a lot of trouble by knowing it. So, aside from the junk that media feeds to people (honestly, even if you don’t pay much attention, some of it still sinks in), I am still searching for my piece of useless knowledge. But while I am searching I succeeded in creating a perfectly impractical post and acquired a new odd piece of new information.

Did you know that after spending a night in the water dried fruits bounce back to their normal size?

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