Friday, August 13, 2010

The last man...uh, men...who knew everything

I was reordering books for the library a few days ago, and one of the books that was lost was called The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured The Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius. Despite the exhaustively long title, I thought the book was quite interesting. The last man to know everything? Really?

I did a search in the library catalog to make sure that it was truly lost and rather than typing in the ENTIRE title, I just typed "the last man who knew everything" and pressed Enter.

Turns out there was more than one last man who knew everything.

My search told me that there were THREE books with the title "the last man who knew everything." These books are:

1) The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young (the book I was trying to replace)
2) Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything
3) Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Now, if you ask me, there should only be one person with the title of "the last man to know everything." I think the authors should have to go back and rename the books like "the second to last man who knew everything" and so on. And I'm pretty sure that they were being very gracious in saying EVERYTHING, too. I mean, when I looked up Joseph Leidy in Wikipedia, it only mentioned that he was into paleontology, anatomy, and parasitology. Those are interesting fields, but what about stuff like nunchuck skills, bow staff skills, and computer hacking skills? Don't those count as some part of everything?

5 comments:

Greg Lewis said...

Does the library have a book called "The First Man Who Knew Nothing"? That would be kind of cool.....

Katie Lewis said...

Haha!

Katie Lewis said...

(The "Haha!" was to Greg's comment.)

Also, I think it would be rather exhaustive and somewhat irrelevant to know everything nowadays. But I guess it could be cool.

Katie Lewis said...

Umm... unless you were God. Then it would be entirely relevant.

Okay I'm done commenting now.

David x- said...

"Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!"