Twitter Backlash for People Who Did Not Know ‘Titanic’ Was Real

news.yahoo.com ^ | April 13, 2012 | Melissa Knowles

[Riley]

Around 1,600 US deaths. How many US folks know about that one?

I did, but shipwrecks in history are an old hobby of mine.

[Scoutmaster]

He just never bothered to learn any Geography.

Perhaps twenty years ago, I read a lengthy, scholarly article on the difference between geography as we perceive it and geography as it exists, and how perceived geography affects us.

The article started off with perhaps a fifty-question quiz, starting with the easier questions such as "which is further north, London or Seattle?", then going into more difficult comparative questions, or questions about distances within a hundred miles, or whether A was further from B than C, or if A was closer to B than C was to D. If you cheated and checked your answers after the first few, you realized that the gut-instinct answer was almost never right.

There's geography as it exists and geography as we perceive it.

[Riley]

for me as a kid it was coin collecting and Avalon Hill War games and I just plain liked to read!

LOL! Tactics II, Panzer Blitz, Panzer Leader, Squad Leader and a bunch of add-ons, 1776 (still have it), Campaign for North Africa (nope, never made it through that one), and a bunch of others that I traded or sold. Then it was Micro Armor and modern naval.

Never got into coins, but as long as there was a library or a bookstore in walking distance, there was *always* something to do.

[Reily]

I knew about the Sultana!
One of the last great tragedies of the Civil War era.
Many of tht passengers were former prisoners from Andersonville. Think of it, survive the living hell of Andersonville only to die on the Sultana!
Also there is a theory that it was one of the last acts of te Confederate Secret Service. An interesting book that theorizes about that is “April 1865”. I don't remember the author's name.

[TXnMA]

So do I. I bet they are now worth quite a bit more than we paid for them... '-)

Folks who read Gamow, at least know the difference between a million and a billion, but folks who read Morrison's "Powers of Ten" can't be fooled by eco-freakos quaking in their boots about the minuscule amount of CO₂ we put into the atmosphere...

Both Gamow and Morrison are very helpful in helping one gain a sense of proportion and perspective.