View from the North 40: Would you run through fire for it?

When I was a wee small human, among my prized family possessions were an impressive 6-inch thick Webster’s dictionary and the full, multi-volume faux-leather bound Encyclopedia Britannica.

One day, after a second-grade class lesson on home safety, I pulled all these books out and stacked them into manageable piles, so that I could determine how many trips it would take me to save all that information from a fire. Six. It would’ve taken six trips. Still, rescuing those books was included in my personal home fire emergency plan.

I was born in those awkward years after the Gutenberg printing press put half of the Catholic monk population out of the book duplication business and before the computer age begat the internet which begat the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia.

To narrow down the time frame, between the time Gene Roddenberry first proposed the Star Trek series and when it first aired on NBC, two momentous things occurred:

1) A real, honest to goodness, I kid you not, door-to-door salesman convinced my then-young parents that they would be almost criminally remiss if they did not buy the dictionary and encyclopedia set to give their budding family every chance to get ahead in this world.

And 2) I was born. I’m not saying angels sang at my birth or anything, but that salesman was sure happy I existed.

The Star Trek series went on to spawn the Star Trek franchise that includes several spin-off series and movies, an animated series, games, figurines, novels, toys, comics and museums. It has inspired parodies and the development of an entire language, Klingon.

I went on to surf the internet, which is how I know about the Star Trek franchise.

A sort of “this week in history” headline from the Feb. 4, 2009 Denver Post popped up on the internet Tuesday: “Klingon sword used in two Colorado Springs heists.”

The lead for the article says “a man wielding a ‘Star Trek Klingon-type sword’ robbed two Colorado Springs convenience stores early this morning.”

Specifically, the “sword” was a “bat’leth,” which a Wikipedia entry on the topic says is “a curved blade approximately 5 feet (1.5 m) long, with two spiked protrusions at each end and three hand holds along the back which can be used to twist and spin the blade rapidly.”

The entry goes on to provide photos and the history of the development of the weapon for the Star Trek franchise, then it describes the history developed for the weapon within the fictional Star Trek world, the cultural legacy of the movie props among Star Trek fans and the legal reasons replicas of the weapon were never produced as moneymakers for the franchise.

The legal section also includes instances in the United Kingdom when people carrying replicas of the weapon were convicted of crimes.

The final paragraph in Wikipedia’s bat’leth entry is about their legality in the U.S. It includes a description of their use in the Colorado Springs robberies, a foot note saying that the information on this 2009 incident was added in 2012.

So what? You are likely asking yourself, unless you are into Star Trek trivia.

1) Even though I access the internet every day, I am still amazed at the vast amount of information available, literally at my fingertips. I’m sure this many interesting things existed in the dark ages when I was a child, but they could only put so much of it in the printed encyclopedias. How in the world could we have all the information everywhere — even if it was condensed into an encyclopedia-length entry — printed in hardcover books.

2) Sitting in front of my stacks of reference books, I never could have imagined the sheer volume of information about the world. And there is no way a young couple with a budding family could house those books and no way they could afford to update them regularly as new information becomes available, like you can with an online entry.

3) The fact that the internet can house this much information with regular updates — and that, in the event of a fire, I can just walk out of my house and let it burn because I have access to it all again the next time I fire up a computer — is, I think, a modern miracle, and should be appreciated as such

But most importantly, 4) how do we keep in mind the value of information if we don’t have to consider whether we would go back into a burning house to rescue it?

Sometimes researching for a column causes a philosophical crisis in my head.

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For what it’s worth, I still own the dictionary and the encyclopedias at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .