Ask the Internet

I experienced a great example of the power of asking the internet this morning.

It started with a trip to a wetland refuge with my wife and a friend couple of ours over the weekend. The trip included some splishing and sploshing through mud as a we explored the marshy expanse on a grey but dry February day in the Pacific Northwest.

One of our friends spotted a strange-looking organic growth of some sort just lying on a stretch of flat tall grass. The grass, acres of the stuff, had been flattened most likely by the regular tide that inundates the area.

The growth she spotted was roughly the size of a banana and was composed of three nodules connected in the middle. It was reddish brown in color and looked to have been deposited where it lay by moving water. That is, it was not growing out of thre ground. See the photo at the top of this post.

None of us could identify the object, so I took a quick photo of it with my phone for later review. If we didn’t know, the internet would.

The experience made me stop and think how much information we have access to at any given moment. I was able to take a photo of an unknown object, transmit it digitally so it appeared in front of the eyes of millions of people, and learn within 12 hours what it was. A truly astonishing notion. What would the best thinkers of centuries ago think of what is available to us now?

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