The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  neat’s-foot oil

  This is a pale yellow oil derived from boiling the feet of cattle. Good Lord. I’m trying to eat an apricot fruit roll here.

  nervous system

  Much more detail on brain damage. This time, quantified detail. After the age of twenty, humans lose 50,000 brain cells a day to atrophy. You probably lost a couple of dozen just reading that sentence. Whoops! There go a bunch more. I still have enough neurons to do a quick calculation on my Palm Pilot: since my twentieth birthday, about 30 million of my precious bits of gray matter have gone belly up. Thirty million! Sure, I’ve got a few billion left, but still.

  I’m glad I didn’t know this back in my carbon-monoxide-obsessed days. But now it’s more incentive to keep reading—I’ve got to compensate for my evaporating cortex.

  New Year

  In India, there’s the ritual boiling of rice. In Thailand, people throw water playfully at one another. Here’s one of those rare times that I know more, thanks to my sister’s husband Willy, a native of Cuzco: in Peru, on New Year’s, women wear yellow underwear.

  Newton, Isaac

  Before my reeducation, I knew the basic points about Sir Isaac: British scientist, believer in deism, discoverer of gravity, alleged victim of a falling apple. The Britannica doesn’t fully endorse the apple theory, calling it an unconfirmed legend. But I was pleased to learn that Newton’s verified inspiration for his theory of gravity is just as interesting as falling fruit—maybe more so.

  Newton’s revelation came during a six-year self-imposed exile from British society. It was 1678, and he had just suffered the first of his nervous breakdowns, which caused him to lock himself away in his home. Yes, Newton was a complete nut job, the angriest and nastiest scientist in history. The Britannica comes right out and uses the phrase “pronounced psychotic tendencies.”

  Among his many feuds was one with philosopher John Locke, to whom he sent strange, paranoid letters accusing Locke of trying to “entangle [him] with women.” Newton also hated the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The two were in a battle over who had invented calculus, and toward the end of his life, Newton expended an enormous amount of energy discrediting Leibniz—even after Leibniz died. As the Britannica puts it: “Almost any paper on any subject from those years is apt to be interrupted by a furious paragraph against the German philosopher. … In the end, only Newton’s death ended his wrath.”

  But back to gravity. So Newton had gone AWOL for several years. Up to that point, he had been a traditional 17th-century mechanistic scientist who saw the world as a bunch of billiard balls colliding. There was no such thing as action at a distance. But during his seclusion, Newton became obsessed with occult works about alchemy and magic treatises, many of them in what was called the hermetic tradition, even copying these texts by hand. These occult books talked about substances having mysterious sympathies and antipathies toward one another, forces that could affect something even without touching it.

  This unconventional idea allowed Newton to take the intellectual leap. This was his apple. The occult forces inspired him to envision forces of attraction and repulsion that worked at a distance, a breakthrough that eventually led to his theory of universal gravity.

  This, to me, is fascinating. Newton—the man who finally gave us a vision of the universe as a rational and orderly place—couldn’t have done it without the help of those weird occult books. Is there a lesson there? I think so. I’m going to keep my mind open, try to be more tolerant of unorthodox ideas, because even the kookiest of them can inspire a profound theory. Maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive of the Kabbalah, or tarot cards, or my New Age aunt from Berkeley who swears that staring at the sun for two minutes every morning is good for your health. No, that last one is crazy.

  nonfictional prose

  It’s Sunday morning and Dad invites Julie and me to the beach. My father loves the beach. Or more precisely, he loves sitting on the beach. The temperature doesn’t matter. He’s not interested in paddleball or Frisbee. He just likes to sit in his beach chair and work. He either works on his twenty-fifth law book or he reads hardbacks—big important nonfiction hardbacks.

  Like many in his generation, he is drawn to the real information, the kind with fiber and vitamins and minerals, not the Ring Ding-quality information I fill up on. My dad devours books like Ezekiel. He reads so intently on the beach that my mother once painted him a T-shirt with the following image: his beach hat floating on the ocean. The implication was that he’d be so engrossed in his reading and writing, he wouldn’t notice if the tide rose and swallowed him up. I think he might read right through the apocalypse. He’d just brush those raining frogs off the page. He might look up, make a mental note that the ocean had turned to blood, then get back to business.

  He’s got the same weakness I have—we both love information so much, we tend to choose it over actual experience. Case in point: when we’d go on trips to Europe, he’d bring along his Fodor’s. We’d get to the Parthenon, and Dad would read passages aloud from the guidebook about its history—the role of Athena and the Centaurs and the Doric columns. Then he’d lower the book, glance at the decaying big marble building for exactly three seconds, then be ready for his next chapter, uh, tourist attraction. And I’m happy to do the same. Which is what I tell Dad. I won’t be able to make it to the beach, but there’s an excellent section in the Britannica on waves, and how they break when the wave depth equals 1.3 times the wave height.

  norms

  Julie and I are on line at JFK’s Alitalia counter. We’re off on a week-long trip to Italy to attend the Memorial Day wedding of our friends Rick and Ilene.

  I’m worried that we’ll be stopped by security. Won’t three clunky volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica passing through the X-ray machine raise a red flag? It’s not exactly the usual vacation-friendly Elmore Leonard paperback. But apparently, Alitalia has respect for scholarship, because we breeze right through.

  The flight is an overnight one, and after reading about nonsense verse and Nordic skiing, I slip my Britannica into the seat pocket and lie back for a nap. I get about ninety seconds of sleep before it starts. The snoring. Two rows behind us, in row 17, seat D, we’ve got a snorer. This isn’t regular snoring—this is Fred Flintstone–style snoring. It’s about the same decibel level as the two-thousand-pound jet engine hanging from the wing. I expect to see the window shades go up and down in its rhythm.

  “My God,” I say.

  “Wow,” says Julie, who has pushed her eyeshades up to her forehead.

  I turn around. There he is, his mouth agape, a meaty doofus, red-faced and plump as a Tuscan tomato, squeezed into a tight yellow tank top. I’m not alone. I notice a dozen others like myself turned around in their seats, marveling at this acoustic phenomenon. No one within a seven-row radius is sleeping.

  A stewardess walks by, and I’m just cranky enough to stop her.

  “Can you wake him up?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, that’s not our policy,” she says, in an Italian accent.

  “But no one on the plane can sleep.”

  “We don’t wake passengers up unless there’s a safety reason.”

  “Well, actually, sleep apnea can be quite dangerous. You can lose oxygen to the brain for up to a half minute.”

  Doesn’t seem to register. “You can wake him yourself if you want.”

  She walks off. Damn. I consider poking the pudgy snorer in the arm and running away, but decide instead on the better strategy of hating him from afar.

  Every couple of minutes the snoring stops, and I have a false moment of hope, but then it revs back up again. I’m screwed. All the knowledge in the world can’t solve this dilemma. That said, my scholarship does help me in one way: I can now see the snoring situation through a clear historical and philosophical framework.

  “This is a classic ethical dilemma,” I say to Julie. “Classic.”

  Julie studies me. She isn’t sure if this is going to be more or
less pleasant than the sound of the snoring.

  “I read about this in the ethics section,” I continue. “We’ve got here a clear-cut example of utilitarianism versus deontology.”

  “Meaning what?”

  I explain: the utilitarians believe in the greatest good for the greatest number. So they’d wake him up. If the philosopher Jeremy Bentham were pushing the dessert cart on Alitalia, you can bet your ass that the Snoring Wonder over there would be wide awake, with some espresso forced down his throat for good measure.

  But deontologists would let him sleep, because they believe in personal rights. Unfortunately, our flight attendant is a deontologist. Deontologists say that if you’re all starving in a lifeboat, you still don’t have the right to kill and eat the sickest person.

  Julie seems mildly interested—more than average, anyway.

  “And which are you?”

  “Well, I think we should wake the snoring jackass up. So I guess I’m a utilitarian.”

  “Huh,” says Julie.

  “Unless I was the one doing the snoring. Then I’m a deontologist.”

  Julie laughs. But sadly, I’m not really joking. I’m a utilitarian for other people and a deontologist for myself. Clearly, I could use a little more growing in the morals department. But at least I know how to label the theories. Which makes me feel better.

  North Italy

  I was hoping that the Britannica would be a good substitute for an Italian-English dictionary. I was crossing my fingers that the Italy section would tell me how to order my pizza with no anchovies and ask how far to the nearest taxi stand. No such luck. That’s not to say the Britannica lacks handy-phrase translations—they just aren’t in Italian. Just so you know, I’ve compiled a little phrase book of things I’ve learned how to say:

  English: Let us, each one of us, move indeed to the west across the creek.

  Hokan Native American language: Yabanaumawildjigummaha’nigi.

  English: The girl ate mush and three biscuits but she wasn’t satisfied.

  Traditional Gullah slave language: Uma-chil’ nyamnyam fufu an t’ree roll-roun, but ’e ain’t been satify.

  English: You are going to remain lying down.

  Haitian Creole: T-ale reste kushe.

  English: I have good friends.

  Esperanto: Mi havas bonajn amikojn.

  I’m not sure why the Britannica in all its wisdom chose those particular phrases to translate. But if I’m ever walking to a Starbucks on the other side of a Hokan reservation and there’s a creek in the way, I’m in excellent shape to encourage my Hokan pals to cross it. Also, I can stage a kidnapping in Haiti. But mi havas no Italian chops.

  This was troublesome. Italy was beautiful and all, and the food was tasty, but I felt helpless, more helpless than I’d felt since this project began. Just finding our hotel in Venice took an exhausting variety of verbal gymnastics and hand signals and maps.

  My insecurity only got worse when we met up with our friends Peter and Sharon and their new baby boy, the three of whom jetted down from London, where they are currently living, to join us for a couple of days. Peter—a tall and chiseled tax lawyer—is a smart one. Whenever we play charades, Peter always puts in obscure historical figures instead of the accepted fare of former MTV veejays or eighties pop stars. His Tenzing Norgay—the Sherpa who accompanied Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest—caused an uproar. Naturally, Peter also speaks fluent Italian. At meals, Julie and I would haltingly place our orders, and then Peter would converse with the waiter for several minutes, spitting out rapid vowel-filled Italian, and the waiter would laugh and slap Peter merrily on the back. Then Peter would turn back to us as if nothing had happened. No translation. What the hell was he saying? I worried it was some variation on “Did you notice that the guy I’m with is a hairy little Jew? Check it out. It’s true.”

  As is customary in Italy, we spend a lot of time eating. We sit for hours in restaurants on various piazzas, with Sam, their baby boy—just six weeks old—alternately attaching himself to Sharon’s breast and speaking loudly in what sounded like Hokan Native American language.

  “Hey, Sam,” says Sharon. “Look over here! Look at Mommy!” Sam turned his eyes toward Sharon, but then rolled his head back and began studying the ceiling.

  “If you want him to look at you, you should probably wear more red,” I say. “Studies show that babies are attracted to the color red.”

  I look around for a prop. Our napkins are red, so I wave mine in front of Sam’s face until his eyes wander over to it.

  “See?”

  I’ve been paying close attention to the child-rearing sections, as Julie and I are hoping to have a breast-loving, head-rolling infant of our own soon.

  Sharon says she’ll think about my tip.

  “He’s getting enough vitamin K, right?” I ask. “Because infants’ large intestines don’t have the bacteria needed to produce vitamin K.”

  “Well, he’s breast-feeding.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You still might want to supplement.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just a thought. Right, Sammy boy?”

  I stroke the outside of his foot.

  “You ticklish, Sam?” Sharon asks. “Is Uncle A.J. tickling you?”

  “Actually, I’m not tickling him. I’m testing his Babinski reflex.” When you gently scratch the outside of an infant’s foot, his big toe is supposed to go upward and his small toes are supposed to spread. I stroke the foot, and Sam’s toes sort of spread, though the pinky toe seems to do most of the shifting. “See that? The Babinski reflex. Goes away after the fourth month. Looks like Sam’s in good shape, so don’t worry.”

  If Julie and I can’t have a child of our own, at least I can show our exasperatingly fertile friends that I know more about babies than they do.

  After lunch, we go to Peggy Guggenheim’s museum. It’s a lovely, clean, white modern art museum on the Grand Canal with a yard where Peggy buried her many beloved dogs. They have an elaborate grave for themselves, worthy of Ramses II.

  As we walk through the museum, Peter stands in front of the paintings with his hand on his chin for minutes at a time. He is appreciating the art. He is appreciating the bejesus out of this art.

  I am jealous. Thanks to the Britannica, I am pretty up on my art history, but I still don’t have the patience to look at any of the pieces for more than a few seconds each. What is Peter seeing that is so fascinating? Does he know the paintings aren’t going to move? They haven’t moved in eighty years, and they aren’t about to start now. But he sees something in there.

  The museum is located in Peggy’s former home, and in her living room, there’s a famous sculpture called Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi. Created in the 1920s, this abstract work looks more like a very elegant copper carrot than a bird. I happen to know a good piece of trivia about Bird in Space, which I decide to share with the art-appreciating Peter.

  “You know, Brancusi got in trouble when he tried to bring this to the States. The U.S. government accused him of trying to secretly import an industrial part into the country.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, almost got him arrested.”

  “That’s fascinating.”

  Peter is genuinely intrigued, and seems happy that I taught him something. He is, clearly, far more evolved than me.

  number games

  It can be a desolate trek, this encyclopedia reading. Yes, I know: I signed up for it voluntarily, which makes it tough to elicit sympathy from friends and family. But it’s still a lonely mission. I’m on the bed in the hotel, an hour after Julie has gone to sleep, reading in silence, no music, no TV, just the Britannica and me, as I wade through sentences such as this one: “During diagenesis, most of the magnesian calcites were transformed into stable assemblages of rather pure calcite, often along with scattered grains of dolomite.” You still there? Good.

  I’m tempted to skip. And I have skipped a few times, but I always feel guilty enough to go b
ack to give hoop skirts (or Herbert Hoover or whatever the victim was) a good skim. Or a decent skim. In any case, a man’s got to find ways to keep himself amused. I’ve become a master of this. I’ve developed dozens of little games. Here are just three:

  1. The Count the Carpets Game. Every few pages, the Britannica features yet another in a dizzying array of carpet patterns. You’ve got your Bakhtiari, Balochi, Bergama, Bijar, Bokhara, and on and on. It feels like a very well organized Middle Eastern bazaar.

  2. The Spot the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest. Here’s a fun visual game based on the little black-and-white pictures in the Britannica. Eighteenth-century French scholar Firmin Abauzit? He looks like Kevin Spacey! Karl Abel, a noted viola player of the 18th-century, is a dead ringer for Drew Carey.

  3. The Worst Ruler Competition. History is brimming with evil leaders you’ve never heard of. Early on, there was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, head of the Central African Republic, who, emulating his hero Napoleon, crowned himself emperor in a sumptuous $20 million ceremony that helped bankrupt his country. Though he did find enough money to also kill a hundred students. (On the other hand, he was acquitted of cannibalism charges.) Pretty bad. But then, in the Cs, Bokassa got some tough competition from Chou, king of China in the 12th century B.C. To please his concubine, Chou built a lake of wine and forced naked men and women to chase one another around it. Also, he strung the forest with human flesh. Chou really put some creativity into his evilness, but he’s not unusual. Every letter has at least one truly dark-hearted cretin who somehow ascended to head of state.

  Once every few hundred pages, the Britannica will come to my rescue and surprise me with a game of its own. In the C section, you can find an actual unsolved New York Times crossword puzzle. Just take your pencil—or pen, if you’re a real puzzler—and fill it in right there on the page.

  Under charades—which was originally the name for a type of riddle, not the pantomime game we know now—I got this brainteaser: