ICYMI

I picked up last month’s double issue of TIME magazine, “The Answers Issue,” subheaded “Everything you never knew you needed to know.” The 44-page section is chockful of trivia to fill up some of the 1-million gigabytes of hard drive space that is supposed to be the equivalent of our brain’s storage capacity.

I googled a million gigabytes, which is about one petabyte. And what exactly does that mean? An answer posted eight years ago by bombhaus says: “1 Petabyte could hold approximately 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text. It could hold 500 billion pages of standard printed text. It would take about 500 million floppy disks to store the same amount of data.” Hard to imagine my little brain holding that much information. You don’t need to have it in your brain, as all that is available to anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection – and, of course, knowledge of how to access that vast universe of information.

There is a great divide between the techies and the no- (or low-) techs, and that demarcation was fully evident on our recent trip to Japan. Our band of eight was divided into the neanderthals (five of us) and the techies (the kids). At the airport one of the techies immediately got her WiFi gadget and connected us, while two neanderthals rented local phones, which turned out to not really be necessary, given the availability of Viber and what’s app and iMessage and other sorts of connectiveness.

It was amazing how easy everything was with just a phone, from looking for, choosing and booking reservations at restaurants to finding the Onitsuka Tiger store (I was finally proclaimed “cool” after I traded in my “old lady shoes” for brown suede Onitsukas), from looking up the background on temples to keeping up with chismis back home, from gathering everyone to meet up at one place in the huge Bic Camera store to getting first aid for a sprain and a bruised nose.

Back to The Answers Issue. While much of the information is targeted at an American readership (Where is the most dangerous intersection in America, for example), some items are relevant to us here in good ol’ Pinas. Manila, Legazpi City and Davao City are among the 15 places that will be most affected by sea-level rise in the next century – 4.39 feet, 1.77 feet and 1.76 feet, respectively, for the three cities. Bangkok tops at 6.76 feet.

I failed dismally in the test to determine if I was smarter than a teenager (the title above means “In case you missed it” in youth-speak), but I was good at deciphering the parentage of designer dogs (should I aim for a maltipom or a pom-a-pug with my little pomeranian?).

Some other bits of trivia are good to know – for example, why heart cancer is so rare (“Tumors grow when abnormal cells divide uncontrollably, but unlike cells in other organs, the ones in your heart do not split and multiply,” but that also means heart tissue cannot regenerate after a heart attack). And the average number of hairs on a person’s head is between 90,000 and 150,000 – that’s average, and subject to challenge, of course.