THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE IN A DREAMWORLD OF DREAMS AND MIGHTY MOUSE'S AND MIGHTY NIGHTMARES

of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong,” which contains nearly 300 pages of information, all of it (apparently) true. Has he lost his taste for the absurd? Not exactly.
Four years ago, Mr. Lloyd devised a brainy British quiz show called “QI” (the letters stand for Quite Interesting), in which quick-tongued panelists compete to be the most amusing storyteller. (Imagine “Jeopardy” with Stephen Colbert as host, with Steve Martin and Ellen DeGeneres as guests, working off a game board loaded with unanswerable questions.) This book, written with John Mitchinson, a writer from the show, puts the rambling wit of “QI” on paper.
Among the revelations: The mosquito is the most dangerous animal on the planet, having killed half the human beings who ever died — some 45 billion people. And quick, can you name an 1887 invention that the entire English-speaking world uses daily? The answer is the word “hello,” which Thomas Edison minted as a greeting back at Menlo Park, bellowing into an early model of Alexander Graham Bell’s phone. Bell preferred “Ahoy, hoy!” but Edison had him at “Hello.”
Trivia buffs and know-it-alls alike will exult to find so much repeatable wisdom gathered in one place, on subjects like Robin Hood’s tights, (Were they green or red? Are you sure?) the scent of the moon (gunpowder, not green cheese, astronauts report) and the sound of shrimps (deafening to underwater ears).
In the Information Age, can you afford to remain ignorant of these precious factoids?
ANOTHER new book, “What Would Socrates Say?” takes a different tack to navigate the imponderable. Two years ago, an Amherst philosophy professor, Alexander George, created the Web site AskPhilosophers.org, where people tormented by life’s paradoxes could appeal to a team of tireless ethicists. So far, over 3,000 questions have been logged, like “Should the tolerant tolerate intolerance?” (try saying that 10 times, fast); and “Why isn’t it just as good to be happy as to be sad?” (duh); and even “Is it morally wrong to profit from other people’s mistakes or stupidity?” (If it were, would AskPhilosophers.org even exist?)
In this book, Professor George prints the most fertile exchanges. Earnest and thorough, the scholars’ responses can also be playful, as in the answer Mark Crimmins (Stanford) supplies to the question: “Is there no such thing as bad art?” “Sure there’s bad art,” he writes.
 “And to prove it, here’s my ASCII picture of a car”:


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More seriously, he admits, “a rather different issue concerns the objectivity of evaluating artworks.” (You were expecting a simple answer from a philosopher?)

The sages like to pull the Socratic trick of answering a question with a question, or deferring knotty problems to other thinkers. When someone asks whether it is selfish to have children, Nicholas D. Smith (Lewis & Clark College) asks the questioner why he supposes that “self-interest is the same as the vice of selfishness.”

To a questioner who asks “If there were a theory of everything” would it “destroy the possibility of free will?” Peter Lipton (Cambridge University) cagily responds, “This is an excellent question, and philosophers do not all answer it in the same way,” before continuing on to show the link between determinism, free will and banana splits.

“What Would Socrates Say” is not something you’d want to wrestle with when you’re feeling “Duntish” (defined by the “Meaning of Liff” as “mentally incapacitated by severe hangover.”) But if you’re sober, and in a mood to mull life’s quandaries what they know won’t hurt you.