A.J. Jacobs Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  Dave’s class actually covers some of the same territory as the god awful speed reading class. But since I like Dave better, I pay attention when he sings the praises of visualization. To remember a fact, he says, you create a little picture in your head. For instance, to remember my name—A.J.—the class comes up with Ajax, and visualizes me washing with Ajax soap. It was vaguely disconcerting having the whole class imagine me doing the dishes or washing my tub. I hope they imagined me with my pants on.

  Regardless, Dave’s system seems to work. We memorize the class names, a string of random words, and the properties of various types of glue, giving ourselves a hand after every victory.

  At the break, I tell Dave about my project. “I’m reading the encyclopedia from A to Z and trying to learn everything in the world. You think I can remember everything?”

  “Absolutely. With the techniques in the home study course, you can definitely do it!”

  “But the encyclopedia’s 65,000 entries—”

  “You can do it! I memorized 2,700 playing cards in two days. In fact, after you do it, you can give me a testimonial!”

  On the one hand, I’m heartened. But on the other hand—a much bigger hand—I’m a little annoyed. I wanted Dave to say, “Wow, not even I—world-renowned memory expert—could attempt such a feat. You are the king! There’s just not enough room in my attic!” But the home study course it is. I give Dave my credit card, which kind of makes me nervous, seeing as he can probably memorize the digits without effort.

  Back in my living room, I listen to CD number two of Dave’s Memory Wiz system, the one where he explains how to memorize definitions. “Let’s have fun with this,” he says. The fun definition we are going to memorize involves the properties of the anti-neutrino particle. The anti-neutrino sounds sort of like “ant” and “newt”, so Dave urges us to visualize an ant carrying a newt on its back. Okay. Now we learn the anti-neutrino is defined as a subatomic particle (now picture the ant and newt driving an atomic submarine). It also has no mass (visualize a priest on the submarine waving his arms to indicate that there will be no communion today) and is emitted during beta decay (the priest also happens to be holding a Betamax that is in desperate need of repair). Voilà! Simple as that.

  It’s a fun little picture. And it makes me want to take a nap. This memorizing thing is going to be harder than I thought. Still, I figure I should give it a whirl, and not just because I paid $129 for the home study course. I flip back a couple of pages. Here’s a good one to try: melee. Melee was the precursor to soccer and was played with inflated bladders or, by the British, with the head of an enemy Dane; by the 11th century, many melees were played on Shrove Tuesday.

  Okay. Here goes: “melee” sounds sort of like “melon.” I’m picturing a melon in the shape of a soccer ball, and this melon really has to go to the bathroom (that’s the bladder). And now it’s stuffing a raspberry Danish into its head (Dane’s head). Now it’s carrying a shovel with two dates (Shrove Tuesday).

  Dave’s system is no doubt a good one. But the thought of creating fun little pictures for each of the 65,000 entries makes my head feel like it’s been kicked by an 11th-century Englishman. I’ll probably return to my current system—which consists of squinting my eyes and looking really hard at the page and hoping a bunch of facts stick to my cerebral cortex.

  No disrespect to Dave, but I figure it’d be nice to consult another memory expert, maybe one from a school that doesn’t have its catalogues on street corners. I force my pride deep into the pit of my stomach and ask my brother-in-law Eric. He’s currently a psychology grad student at Columbia University, after having mastered and gotten bored with, successively, foreign diplomacy, computer programming, and investment banking. He allows me to accompany him to a class, though he does make me sit in the back and ask that I stay silent. Afterward, I spend a few minutes talking to his cognition professor, David Krantz, a man with a flower-print shirt and serious glasses.

  My main question is, how much can one man remember? And for this, Krantz doesn’t have a precise answer. He won’t say, “Humans can store two-point-three million facts,” or, “You can memorize everything in A to Q, but then you won’t be able to squeeze another fact in.” Apparently, annoyingly enough, human memory can’t be quantified that way.

  Instead, Krantz tells me that “memorization is a business where the rich get richer.”

  Meaning?

  “The more you know about a topic, the more you’ll be able to remember.”

  In other words, I’ll get richer and richer in history, pop culture, literature—but my quantum physics and chemistry knowledge, which were at poverty levels at the start, will barely climb to the lower middle class by the end. I guess after reading thousands of pages I’d sort of figured this out, but still, it’s a little sad to hear it from an expert. I can fill in some holes in my education—but only the shallow ones. The deeper ones I can only sprinkle dirt on.

  metric system

  I’m a convert to the metric system. I feel un-American even typing those words. I feel like I just admitted that I prefer a nice Linzer torte to apple pie or that I’m too busy to go to Shea Stadium because I have to watch Manchester United on the telly. But I’ve come to the realization that, kilogram for kilogram, it’s just a better measurement system.

  I knew very little about the metric system. All I knew was that I resented it creeping into my life—with its liters of Pepsi and ten-kilometer races. Not that I did ten-kilometer races, or bought grams of cocaine, but I did drink the occasional Pepsi, and I didn’t like it coming in foreign amounts. Now I say, bring on the metric system. I’m ready for it.

  The thing that got me was the exhausting variety of weights and measures out there. Every few pages I’d run into another one—the chaldron, the chain, the link, the wine gallon, the ale gallon, the corn gallon, the Queen Anne’s gallon, the gill, the cubit, the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, the cord, the Old London mile, the Irish mile, the Scottish mile, the libra (from which the abbreviation lb. comes), and on and on. And that’s not to mention the ways people cooked up these measurements—no doubt after a few gills of whiskey. Like the rod: “The ‘rod’ was once defined as the length of the left feet of 16 men lined up heel to toe as they emerged from church.” What? What’s a church got to do with it? Do men’s feet change size when they leave a good sermon? And there’s the inch. One of the first definitions was the breadth of a man’s thumb at the base of the nail. Scientists, however, refined that to the breadth of three men’s thumbs—one small, one medium, one large—divided by three. Later, it became the length of three grains of barley. But you might prefer the competing definition of twelve poppyseeds. Exhausting.

  Diversity is good in ecosystems and stock portfolios, but in weights and measurements, uniformity is kind of nice. I’ve come to see the metric system as the Starbucks of measurement systems. Yes, Starbucks is annoyingly ubiquitous—but there’s a reason for that. The Frappuccinos are delicious. So stop trying to fight it.

  There’s plenty to like about the much-despised metric system. It was born during the French Revolution, which automatically makes it cooler. And I knew it was rational—but I didn’t know quite how rational. The French scientists defined the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. And the kilogram was designed to be the weight of one thousand cubic centimeters of water. Then there are those prefixes. I was familiar with the “kilo” and “cento” and “nano,” but I was happy to learn about the outer reaches, the “peta” and the “exa” and the “tera.” I started dropping them into conversation. I’d pop my head into my boss’s office. “I just want a picosecond of your time. Maybe just a femtosecond.”

  Of course, as with everything lovable, the metric system has its flaws. It turned out the weight of a cube of water was too hard to measure. So that’s no longer the definition of a kilogram. No, a kilogram is now defined as the weight of a hunk of metal sitting in this building outside of Paris.
This was shocking to me. There’s an actual kilogram—a master kilogram, they call it—a platinum-iridium cylinder in a town called Sèvres. I had read about how the ancient Egyptians kept a master cubit of black granite against which all cubit sticks were measured. Apparently, we haven’t moved past that.

  It gave me Movie Idea Number Five: The Great Metric Caper. A bunch of professional thieves—perhaps with Donald Sutherland as the old guy in for one last big job—swipe the master kilogram and plunge the world’s weights and measurement system into chaos. Maybe they hold the master kilogram for ransom. And there’s got to be a good scene where the Asian thief played by B. D. Wong uses the master kilogram as a jujitsu stick.

  Regardless, the master kilogram seems to teach like a profound lesson. In the end, the world hinges on physical things. You can theorize all you want, make abstract arguments for days on end, but eventually you just have to roll up your sleeves and carve yourself a hunk of metal.

  Michelson-Morley experiment

  Julie wants to see the Einstein exhibit at the Natural History Museum. I agree to go, though I trudge over there with a bad attitude. Maybe it’s a rebellion against my father—who has reverence for all things Einsteinian—but I’ve always been a little skeptical of Einstein. Yes, he was smart. But was he that smart? Was he really a thousand light-years ahead of Dirac and Bohr and all those other neglected shlubs who will never have their faces on T-shirts or children’s videos? Was he so smart that he should be synonymous with intelligence itself? I remember being annoyed when a book came out a couple of years ago by a guy who drove cross-country with Einstein’s brain. Einstein’s legendary brain. Enough already. “I’m going to write a book about driving across the country with Darwin’s pancreas,” I told Julie at the time. “And after that, I’m taking the bus with Newton’s lower intestines.”

  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” she replied, her all-purpose response for when she thinks I’m engaging in crazy talk.

  Since embarking on my quest to smarten up, I’ve gotten even more jealous of Einstein and his unceasing good publicity. Will anyone ever say that I’m as smart as Albert Einstein? Probably not. What about someone saying I’m as smart as Alfred Einstein, his cousin, a noted music historian who also gets a nice write-up in the Britannica? Maybe not even that. So I walk into the museum’s exhibit with a grudge.

  The first room in the exhibit is filled with domestic relics of the man himself. A couple of pipes that Einstein puffed upon, a compass he fiddled with, a little puzzle he figured out as a kid. In a glass case, I find a letter he wrote to his wife in an attempt to save his doomed marriage. It read: “You will make sure that I get my three meals a day in my room. You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way.”

  Ha! That’s not so smart. That’s not so smart at all. I may not have a Nobel Prize on my mantle, but I know you don’t write an ultimatum like that to a woman and expect it to work. That’s about as likely to work as aeromancy (predicting the future based on atmospheric phenomena).

  I wander over to another little plaque. This one says Einstein refused to celebrate birthdays. As he explained: “It is a known fact that I was born, and that is enough.” This is good. I go fetch Julie, knowing she’ll disapprove. Julie loves birthdays. She manages to stretch her own birthday into a series of celebrations she calls a birth week, and which she’s threatening to expand to a birth month.

  “Einstein hated birthdays,” I say. “Pretty dumb, huh?”

  “Wouldn’t be my choice,” she says. “But then again, I’m not busy solving the mysteries of the universe.”

  Not quite the outrage I was hoping for.

  The next room in the exhibit is devoted to Einstein’s physics. I decide it’s time I understood them once and for all. How hard can they be? Over the years, I’ve had sporadic flashes of comprehension. When I was about ten, my dad explained to me that, under the special theory of relativity, those people who reside on the highest floors of apartment buildings live longer than those who make their homes on the lower floors. This is because the earth’s rotation makes the higher floors move through space faster than the lower floors, just as the tip of the Ferris wheel is going faster than the hub. Relativity says time slows down as you go faster. So odd as it may seem, you actually age less if you live in the penthouse. About a trillionth of a second less, but still, it’s something. This always made me envious of my friends who lived in penthouses. The lucky bastards. As a kid, I remember spending many afternoons at Jonathan Green’s twenty-ninth-floor apartment, and not just because we enjoyed tossing cantaloupes off the balcony and watching the splatter patterns. No, I was actually lengthening my life.

  So anyway, that was my introduction to relativity. Over the years—in high school physics classes and the occasional pop science book—I expanded my knowledge, though not as much as you might think. And since I haven’t gotten to the R’s yet, the Britannica hasn’t helped me much. (The Einstein entry dealt with his life—his bad grades in geography, his love of sailing—but not his theories).

  Julie and I shamelessly eavesdrop on a tour for a visiting high school group. The tour guide—a nice Asian man who took frequent sips from his plastic cup of water—is trying to spice Einstein up for his teenage audience. He says things like, “Einstein was as famous as Justin Timberlake, J. Lo and Ashton Kutcher combined.” The kids seem impressed, if skeptical.

  Our guide explains something called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which proved that a beam of light projected from a moving object does not go faster than one from a stationary object. Light’s a weird animal, he says. As counterintuitive as it may be, it doesn’t behave like a Frisbee or softball tossed from a moving pickup truck. It behaves like nothing else.

  “Einstein said the speed of light is the same relative to any observer,” says our guide. “That’s the special case of relativity. If the speed of light is the same, what changes? Time.”

  Whenever I feel that I’m understanding something profound, I get a little head rush that starts in the back of the neck and shoots toward my forehead. I love that head rush—I used to get it all the time back in my golden intellectual days. And right now, I’m getting a powerful one. The special theory of relativity clicked. I get it. See? That Einstein wasn’t in another league from me. If I had been presented with the same data, I might well have come up with the same theory. Right?

  On the other hand, the general theory of relativity, which we tackle next, is a bit more complex. The guide talks about how the universe is like Jell-O with an unappetizing fruit cocktail mixed into it—bananas, pineapples, strawberries, you name it. “That’s the general theory of relativity,” he says. The high school students nod politely. “Space is like the Jell-O. Space is beautiful. We are the blobs of fruit. We mess up space. We bend space. We are the blobs.” The Jell-O metaphor isn’t quite working for me. No head rush this time. Maybe it’s true—I’m no Einstein.

  The room we’re in has a bunch of his original papers on the wall—papers scribbled with equations and notations that are light-years over my head. Well, at least I know that Berserkers fought naked. You think Einstein knew that? Probably not. Did he know that Hawthorne was obsessed with the number 64 or that Caravaggio killed a man during tennis? Doubt it. As the general theory of relativity slips farther from my grasp, that cushions my ego just a bit.

  “You had enough?” I ask Julie. She has, so we increase our life span by walking home at a quick clip.

  migration

  Julie’s going to Seattle this Wednesday to visit her college friend Peggy. A nice little five-day jaunt. She made the reservations several months ago—back when we were confident she’d be plumped up in second trimester by now. But she’s not. Still zero signs of any in utero action. Insanely frustrating. Julie and I agreed that she shouldn’t be held hostage by our never-ending fertility woes. Plus, she’s 90 percent sure that she ovulated on Tuesday, and won’t be releasing a single gamete while in Seattle. So off she goes in a cab to JFK Ai
rport.

  And that’s when I begin to worry. What if she’s wrong? What about that 10 percent chance that she is, in fact, ovulating on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday? Should we gamble with this? Should we risk never having a kid because I wanted to stay in New York and Julie wanted to go kayaking with her old pal?

  By Thursday midafternoon, I’m on the phone with an airline ticket agent doing some serious damage to my Visa card in exchange for a round-trip weekend reservation to Seattle. I’m migrating. That’s the way I think of it. I am migrating thousands of miles to spawn. I’m not so different from the North American eel, which, after fifteen years of paddling around in streams, suddenly sprouts enlarged eyes, turns from yellow to silver, and swims hundreds and hundreds of miles down the streams and out into the ocean and all the way to the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea (east of the Caribbean), where it does its reproductive business.

  That’s me on Friday evening, with enlarged eyes, sitting in the aft of an American Airlines jet and migrating to another time zone. (Incidentally, Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot on what would become American Airlines).

  I get to Seattle by midnight—but the migration isn’t over. I have to take a cab to the ferry, which will in turn take me to the obscure hippyish island on which Peggy lives. The ferry, it turns out, doesn’t run all that often after midnight. So for an hour and a half, I’m stuck sitting on a dock with a couple of in-lust teenagers, an angry-looking burly man who resembles an extra in a sixties motorcycle gang movie, and an oddly well-appointed middle-aged woman. It’s too dark to read my trusty Britannica. So I’m left staring at my fellow cast of ferry waiters.

  The teens grope some more. The angry man seethes. And the middle-aged woman applies some lipstick. I hope for her sake the lipstick is not made from cinnabar, like the red war paint of 19th-century Indians in California. Cinnabar is a type of mercury, and the Indians’ red war paint—unbeknownst to them—actually made them sick from mercury poisoning. Maybe that’d be a good way to stop wars, I think. Camouflage paint that makes everyone sick.