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December 09, 2004

Trivia Last Night

There were a couple of interesting things at trivia last night. The first was around a question which asked "Which NYC building has inscribed on it a quote from Herodotus about 'Persian Messengers'?" I guessed the Post Office and overrode Bill's idea of the Library and we turned it in. However, after we turned it in but before the answer was read I suddenly thought, "But, wait, I know exactly what quote is on the Post Office buildings (partly reminded of by recent reading of Pratchett's Going Postal) and did they have 'snow and sleet' in Persia?" Well, turns out they did and this was the quote.

The second issue was over the final question of "What country in the world has the most universities?" Well, they gave the answer of India and I found a web site which supports this but I found a ton more which give much smaller numbers and seem to indicate the US (which we went with) has far more. The US has at least 900 Universities, another 900 colleges and possibly as many as 4000 - couldn't find a definitive number. India according to two sites only had 177 in '91 and 219 in '97 so the idea that they have more in '04 is totally unrealistic. I therefore think the site listing them with about 8000 is including places that we here, at least, would not call 'universities' like shorter 2yr community college or trade school equivalents. If anyone knows a good cite for more information on this, I'd love to see it. I spent a good while doing searches and really couldn't find a definitive answer from an authoritative site.

Posted by aarondf at December 9, 2004 04:43 PM

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