Biblioteca de Recursos
Who's the smartest person in America? Much to the dismay of Ken Jennings, a lot of people think he is.
Jennings, of course, is the guy who won 74 straight games of Jeopardy-amounting to 2,220 minutes-while pocketing more than $2.5 million along the way. Sure he's got a big brain, but the biggest? [RT: 29.03]
Thousands of scientists spend millions of hours discovering information that could change your life. If you knew about it. But you don't. Instead, it sits on shelves, gathering dust. Easy ways to be happier, healthier, more successful—it's all there. But it may as well not exist. So, one day, David Niven decided to do something about it. [RT: 22.53]
Information is like oil, Marshall Brain says. It works best when it's refined.
Brain is one of the world's busiest refiners. His website, HowStuffWorks.com, explains everything you ever wanted to know about, well, everything. Autos? It's there. Autopsies? Yup. Sudoku? Voodoo? iPods? eBay? Check, check, check and check. [RT:41:02]
Imagine everything we know in one place. Jimmy Wales not only imagines it, he's working on it. The cofounder of Wikipedia has set himself the goal of accumulating all human knowledge in his online encyclopedia. And he says he's getting close—at least in the English-language version, where there are now nearly 2 million articles. [RT: 10:57]
Ten years out of college and A.J. Jacobs felt like he was getting dumber by the day. A showbiz journalist for publications like Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, his intellectual feats consisted of interviews with C-list celebrities and critiques of new sitcoms.
"My IQ took a belly flop," says Jacobs. "I forgot all about Homer the Greek poet and I knew way too much about Homer Simpson." [RT: 23:39]
What is information? No one knows for sure, says Hans von Baeyer: "All of us know lots about it without really being able to define it. It's like love."
Not the sort of answer you expect from a physics professor. But von Baeyer is not the sort of physics professor you expect. He spends much of his time writing not for scholarly journals but for magazines like New Scientist, Discover, and Reader's Digest [RT: 34:39]
It's 3 a.m. and Dany Levy, founder of DailyCandy, is curled up with her laptop. While the rest of the world sleeps, she's dashing off e-mails and scouring her favorite news sites on the web.
"I just can't seem to get off my computer," says the self-confessed information addict. "It drives my friends and family mad. It even makes my boyfriends crazy." [RT: 26:11]
Want to read President Kennedy's original papers on the Cuban missile crisis? Or hear a recording of his inaugural address, in which he famously said, "Ask not what your country can do for you..."
Until now you would have had to pack your bag and travel to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. But thanks to an ambitious new project to digitize the library's 48 million pages of documents... [RT: 31:52]
David Sifry kept searching. He tried Yahoo and Google. But he wasn't finding what he really wanted: himself. "I just wanted to know when anyone in the world was talking about me," he says.
The year was 2002 and Sifry had just discovered blogging. He was hooked-not so much on the chance to vent his own opinions but to see what other people were saying about him. [RT: 28:32]
