Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Information Age

A factoid I recently stumbled across... The price of a passport for a child under 3 years is $22. For $24, you can get a passport with 48 pages (double the usual amount). That's what we used to call a "businessman's passport".

I want to know how many toddlers have 48-page passports. I was unable to find out through Google or True Knowledge. Back in the day I'd call up the Globe & Mail fact-checking department or ask a reference librarian. There also used to be giant books of facts like the Canadian Almanac and the New York Times Desk Reference.

I had a similar problem a few months ago when I was trying to discover the closest hippopotomus to my house.

In some ways we have less access to information than we used to.

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