The virtue of remembering?

There you go again. I say 'remembering' and you can only think of that one thing. NO, NO, NO! I am not about the start on the virtues of remembering chaps who pop in thirty years after you last saw them and croak, "Remember me?" I mean, come on, how does one look at a bald, overweight, wheezing wreck of a man and recollect the svelte 16 year old who won the 100m race back at school? (Am I not a wreck too? So I am but I am not the one asking the other guy to remember me. And I will have you know that I did NOT win the 100m race either, my only success in athletics being that of applauding the loudest from the sidelines. So there!)

It so happened that I came across one of those WhatsApp videos about the design of the bullet train in Japan. Apparently, initially the sonic boom of the train exiting a tunnel used to be problem for the neighborhood and, therefore, an engineer was tasked with cutting it down/out. Being a birdwatcher, our man realised that the kingfisher dives down at such speeds to get fish and neither creates a sonic boom nor splatters upon hitting water. And, so, he based his bullet train design on the beak of the Kingfisher.

Being the sort of innocent-at-large who believes whatever he comes across, I assume that this is true. Though I'd not be surprised if someone popped out and said that it is one of the top lessons from WhatsApp University which is guaranteed false either. Any way, my point would still hold.

You see, when you KNOW you want to know something (like knowing the movie in which a song featured), you can google for it. So, it's not a big deal if you cannot remember it. The issue is that knowing AND remembering something can come in handy in a totally unrelated area where you'd otherwise not even think to check it out. As in, does a locomotive designer automatically google for questions in ornithology when faced with a problem in design? It is only when you already know AND remember facts that you can put it together creatively.

I have had to face a great deal of issues, though, because of doing it. As in, people do not even think school algebra is worth remembering. So, on a matter of policy, where the procedure looked right on the face of it but my school algebra proved that it would be wrong in application...ah, I was initially looked on as a trouble-maker trying to create problems where none existed in order to push myself into prominence. AND, later, when the problems did surface, I was suddenly the genius. GENIUS? For remembering school algebra, I ask you.

But, yeah, in a day when the job of remembering has been shelved off to Google, the chap who can actually remember IS a genius. AND only he can be a real genius.

For, after all, most of genius IS thinking out of the box. AND, normally, you will only google for in-the-box (as in what you know you ought to know but don't know) facts! How then will you be creative?