You Can Learn Virtually Anything!
April 11, 2011
Probably the best thing about the internet is it’s unbridled ability to pass information. Virtually anything you’d want to know is on the internet, but it always hasn’t been this simple to find. Two sites I consider the main reason why every nugget of knowledge is at your fingertips. Google and Wikipedia. Today’s comic is a little example of how these websites have changed our lives.
Google wasn’t the first search engine out there, but it was the first to become a household name. Google has grown to become so much more than just a search engine. When you use the Google search engine chances are for pretty much every search one of the first, if not the first page that shows up is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, it knows everything. If the Human Race as a whole had a hive mind it would be called Wikipedia.
On a side note the growth of smart phones has made this information that much more accessible. I recently got an iPhone and I love the little guy, every day I use it to look up something, and well I think it’s psychic. It uses the Google search engine of course, (It can also use bing, but seriously, fuck bing.) And you know when use type stuff into Google, Google will try to guess what you’re typing before you finish? Well I was watching House the other day and they mentioned in passing, thrombocytopenia. Only said it once, and never explained what it was. So I take out my trusty little space phone and start typing. Now I didn’t know how to spell thrombocytopenia, I doubt few non-medical type people do, and even fewer know it’s something to be spelled. So I start typing, t, h, r, o, m, and it was after the m Google on my iPhone said, “Need not type another letter, thrombocytopenia, that’s the word you’re looking for. You’re welcome.”
I found it hard to believe, of all the medical terms that start with thrombo, my iPhone felt that thrombocytopenia was the most relevant. Not thrombosis, the formation of a blood clot, or thrombolytic, a family of drugs to break up said blood clots, no thrombocytopenia, a severe deficiency a platelets in your blood. You iPhone, are inside my brain, and I don’t really mind.