There were two problems with this idea. First, it led to crappy “virtual reality” movies like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man. And second, in the long run, it turned out to be totally wrong.
The commercial break before Final Jeopardy is usually the only time that the show stops tape. You’re given as long as you want to do the math required to make your wager.
Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.
When you make a decision, you need facts. If those facts are in your brain, they’re at your fingertips. If they’re all in Google somewhere, you may not make the right decision on the spur of the moment.
I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.
If it’s on the Internet, then it’s gotta be true.
It’s boring to have the same guy win. I’m actively rooting against myself.
Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.
We don’t realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.
If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I’m sort of screwed. I’m going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.
We regret the insinuation that Mr. Alex Trebek is a robot, and has been since 2004. Mr. Trebek’s robotic frame does still contain some organic parts, many harvested from patriotic Canadian schoolchildren, so this technically makes him a ‘cyborg,’ not a ‘robot.’
I have always loved maps.
I can’t relax and sink back in the couch and watch ‘Jeopardy!’ the way I used to.
You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.
I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.
You watch an old ‘Jeopardy!’ and the categories alone are very plain. ‘Poetry,’ or ‘Movies,’ or ‘Physics.’ If you watch it now, though, there’ll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.
There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall.
Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don’t have to remember everyone’s number anymore, but that really wasn’t a core part of my brain.
As Jeopardy devotees know, if you’re trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it’s just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.
I always bring my kids vacation souvenirs printed in Comic Sans, so they know I love them but not unconditionally.