Ken Jennings Quotes

Trivia is mainstream. 'Nerd' is the new 'cool.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.

Borders may divide us, but, paradoxically, they're also the places where we're nearest to one another.

After all, we're currently living in a Bizarro society where teenagers are technology-obsessed, where the biggest sellers in every bookstores are fantasy novels about a boy wizard, and the blockbuster hit movies are all full of hobbits and elves or 1960s spandex superheroes. You don't have to go to a Star Trek convention to find geeks anymore. Today, almost everyone is an obsessive, well-informed aficionado of something. Pick your cult: there are food geeks and fashion geeks and Desperate Housewives geeks and David Mamet geeks and fantasy sports geeks. The list is endless. And since everyone today is some kind of trivia geek or other, there's not even a stigma anymore. Trivia is mainstream. "Nerd" is the new "cool.

The great thing about knowing stuff is that anyone can do it.

The real cocktail party conversation would probably go something like this: "Actually, I have a degree in geography." "Geography? Wow, I'm terrible with maps. I bet YOU know all your state capitals, though!" (Geographer's smile freezes, left eye starts to twitch uncontrollably.)

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth." "Right, like geologists." "Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..." "So, it's like oceanography or hydrology." "And the atmosphere." "Meteorology, climatology..." "It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet." "How is that different from ecology or environmental science?" "Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--" "Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci." "Some geographers specialize in different world regions." "Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department." "They're not." (Long pause.) "So, uh, what is it that do study then?

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.

Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way that many twentieth-century Americans began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks

One of the most significant barriers to progress is the lack of effective leadership.

I pick up Dylan. He certainly takes after his father: about three-quarters of his body weight seems to be head, and three-quarters of that is ears.

First machine kicked man’s ass physically, then machine started taking over the left-brain when Deep Blue bested Kasparov in chess, and then finally the machine fully took over the left-brain when Watson beat the great Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. And now these terminators are coming after right-brained activities too—the creative and emotional side of the brain. Pretty soon we’ll all be driving cars with bumper stickers that say, “Robots make better lovers.

Self-esteem is important because it sets up a powerful cycle of personal growth and willingness to take risks.

Getting your ego out of the way has an even deeper organizational impact.

To serve the many, you first serve the few.

I feel about Flannery O'Connor the same way that terrible people feel about Ayn Rand.

What are those bulb things you're slicing?" "You've never seen fennel? It looks like celery and tastes like licorice.

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.

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

In this country, we were not into detail. Europe developed detail.” “Why do you think that is?” “Weather. The whole history of England consists of finding things to do out of the weather. Which tells you why Russia was even worse. That’s why Russian novels have 182 characters: bad weather.

In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.

Trivia, as I’ve said before, shouldn’t really be called “trivia.” Facts about history, geography, books, movies, music—this is the stuff that used to be called good old-fashioned “general knowledge,” the stuff that everybody was supposed to remember from school, regardless of their career niche. We lost something the more we specialized—it started to drain away this vast pool of information that everybody knew. Knowledge was what connected us, and now it distinguishes us.

In general your brain stretches out time when there's a lot going on. That's why time seems to pass more slowly in childhood than it does in adulthood—because kids are doing so many new things for the first time. If you want to have a longer-seeming life, that's the secret...Keep trying lots of new things, and enjoy each moment!

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.

When a leader keeps personal ego in check it builds the confidence and self-esteem of others.

Your butt may like to sit, but your butt is not the boss of you! Say no to your butt.

If you never open a map until you're lost, you're missing out on all the fun.

...there probably isn't a marriage or a relationship or a friendship anywhere today that wasn't jump-started by trivia.

Every day we forget stories. I saw a funny video about a cat on the Internet this morning, but when I tried to tell a friend about it, I suddenly had no idea how it ended.

Something can be important without being serious.

(Trunk-or-treating, for those who don’t know, is just like trick-or-treating, except with cars instead of houses, lame decorations instead of awesome ones, and no fun instead of fun.)

Many Indigenous cultures have no tradition of judgment in the afterlife at all. It stands to reason that the spirits didn’t reward or punish everyone perfectly in this life, so why should they start now?

As a kid, I always assumed the know-it-alls on Jeopardy! were obviously the smartest people in America. If you were smart, that's how you showed it: by knowing all your state flowers and kings of Saxony. But what if Rob's right and that's a different, much shallower kind of intelligence? Is my mountain of flash cards all for naught?

So maybe we never would have realized we were so compatible if we hadn't been trading song lyrics and movie dialogue. That's textbook trivia right there." Mindy looks unconvinced. "But that's how *everybody* gets together. They find some dumb thing they both know a little about that they can talk about until the waiter brings dinner. According to you, there probably isn't a marriage or a relationship or a friendship anywhere today that wasn't jump-started by trivia." "I think that's exactly right," I agree. "To trivia.

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

The theory of servant leadership is vital, but it’s the active Serving Leader that makes the critical difference.

Serving Leaders direct credit to others.

The leader turns the pyramid onto its head in order to serve others.

By putting others first the Serving Leader is able to catalyze the creation of high- performance teams.

The key is selecting the right people to join the team, those with the right skills and values, those who embrace our purpose.

I knew early on that children weren’t in my plans. I never once played with baby dolls. I preferred Barbies because it would have been illegal to dress up a baby for her Studio 54 date with Ken. I never felt a biological tug looking at children. It’s not that I’m missing maternal feelings, it’s more like they apply only to cats and dogs, possibly small monkeys. While I’m happy for everyone who wants a family, I look at the notion of having kids the same way I look at people who get tattoos on their faces, like, “Hoo-boy, that’s permanent.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: “Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

It seems clear from these results that the purpose of most bullying is to secure status and avoid resistance of any kind. So bullies don’t pick on a classmate in hopes of getting a reaction. Quite the contrary: they bully in hopes of getting no reaction at all.

The essential traits we associate with maps today evolved gradually over millennia. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances don’t appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth” maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.

Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.

diploma.

Southwick informs us that a Colonel Townsend of Dublin had the ability to stop his heartbeat at will and 'at last lost his life in the act,' that lightning turns milk sour, and that Adam, of Adam-and-Eve fame, was born on October 28, 4004 B.C. Adam is a Scorpio!

To a nation of grandparents nostalgic for a time when everyone listened to Toscanini on the radio, tired of having to watch people on TV win money for bungee jumping and eating goat rectums, Jeopardy! is sweetly cerebral relief piped in straight from the Eisenhower era, a time capsule from ana age before America dumbed down.

Former Olympian distance runner Lynn Jennings shared that her best races were ones in which she wanted to quit halfway through. Why? Because she was out on the edge, pushing herself… The result was championship level performances.

One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom.

Some people say you don’t need a good memory in the Google age. Ken Jennings said, “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.

Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments of earth have been built over solemn asses. - Thomas Corwin