For as long as we’ve had smartphones, Matt and I have had a rule. Whenever we wonder about something, be it a simple fact, or a complicated political history, we try to look it up. Like what’s the difference between a pine tree and a conifer? What are the origins of the expression “high and dry?”

In the age of google, it just seems silly to say, “I wonder…” and not find out the answer. Sure, sometimes the only answer we find is Wikipedia, or better still, some random one off reference on a blog of questionable reliability, but even if only 70% if what we learn is true, we still know 70% more than we did before.

I think the only time I actually wrote about one of these questions was back on my old blog with the post, I promised you Dragon Sex. It wasn’t necessarily educational, but it was entertaining, and actually many of these quests for knowledge really end up being pretty entertaining exercises.

I thought it could be kind of neat to start doing this on a regular basis, blogging about the questions and the “answers” we find out. Maybe some of them will be interesting to other people, and I’ll try to skip the ones that are simple or boring.

This is, I guess, a very minor part of our lives, but I like the idea of having it be our automatic routine as Ender gets older. When he gets to his “why” stage, I want to be able to say, “I don’t know. Let’s go look it up.” I want him to grow up knowing how to find things out.