Guinness Book of World Records

1 Comment July 29, 2019 Steve A. Wiggins

Maybe you went through it too. In your teenage years the fascination began. Before you knew it, you had a stack of them tucked away, each well-thumbed and ogled over. Guinness Books of World Records, I mean, of course. We’re captivated by extremes. While working on a fictional story the other day, I started wondering about longevity claims. The Good Book suggests that once upon a time a century was the equivalent of becoming a teenager, and people were acting like teenagers well into their eighth or ninth centuries. Modern scientific analysis provides an alternative narrative, putting upper limits at 120, with only one verified, and disputed, case putting someone over it. Curious, I looked at Wikipedia. Two pages (at least) address the issue, one on human longevity tout court and another on verified claims. Since the lists include home nations, I began to notice a pattern.

The verified records tend to feature the United States, Japan, Canada, and Europe. The unverified Russia, Latin America, and Western Asia. This disparity struck me as perhaps a bias concerning the source of reliable information. Not only affecting longevity reports, concerns about reliable data impact all our sources of information. I’ve written about internet resources before, but here I’m mainly worried about the bias of “first world” records as opposed to the records of less developed countries. Not only that, but in the case of longevity claims, those born in outlying areas—beyond the reach of official government recorders—are suspect when compared to those kept by city dwellers. We tend to trust our own kind, especially when it comes to extreme claims.

Like John Mellencamp, I was born in a small town. Official records, comfortably handwritten, indicate when and where that happened, to the nearest day. (Birth is a process, of course, and doesn’t always obey conventional human time-marking practices. Organic events are often that way.) The fact of the existence of other people indicates that they too have been through this in some form. The event was marked in the way of local custom. It’s locally true. I knew a doctor trained in Sweden. She couldn’t practice medicine in the United States for fear of what boils down to competing forms of belief. Xenophobia in medical practice extends to other areas of human knowledge as well. We are taught to trust the information given by our own authorities, but not those of other cultures. I’m suppose to accept that without question, but I wasn’t born yesterday.

Leave a comment September 1, 2015 Steve A. Wiggins

Everything we do is an investment in the future. Some times it’s intentional, and other times it’s purely accidental. My wife sent me a CNN story about what might be the oldest message in a bottle ever found. It’s difficult to conceive an idea more romantic than the lonely castaway throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, hoping for rescue. The size of the oceans make any such chance qualitatively smaller than the smallest possible needle in the largest possible haystack. The sheer volume of the oceans is among the most mind-boggling quantities on earth. The chances of finding a single bottle in the blue is practically nil. Still, the message in the bottle is an investment in the future. We hope it will be found, despite the odds.

This particular bottle, although of some scientific value, is the least of the romantic kind. George Parker Bidder III, a third-generation scientist, dropped about a thousand bottles into the sea to study deep ocean currents. This was more than a century ago. Those finding the bottles were instructed to send the message back to Bidder, now long dead, so that he might enter the data in his notes. Bidder died in 1954, and one of his bottles was just recently found in Germany. Here is a case of a man writing to himself beyond the grave. Could he ever have imagined that six decades after his death a sample of his work would be found? For those who’ve labored only to be forgotten in their own lifetimes, this is like finding a genie in a bottle. We want to believe our lives have made a difference. For most of us, we go through our daily chores never really sure that any more than a handful of people care, and most of them only care if it is earning something for the company. Others stand on the shore and throw bottles into the sea.

The Bible has positive words to say about casting your bread upon the waters. Indeed, it will come back to you, we’re told, in a time of need. This is a metaphor, of course. It is all about investing in the future. When it comes to money, this doesn’t often work. Some people are fortunate in their investments, but many are not. Bidder wanted to know about deep water currents. This bottle would have told him something about them, but he isn’t here to receive the news. Instead he is being heralded as someone who deserves to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. Maybe not a scientist’s first choice of memorials, but an investment is an investment. More people will read about world records than will ever find a message in a bottle, no matter how metaphorical.