<story><title>What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know</title><url>http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F10FB355B1B7A93C3A8178ED85F458285F9</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>loboman</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-education.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison...&lt;/a&gt; &apos;While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. &quot;What is the speed of sound?&quot; If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not &quot;carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.&quot; Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison&apos;s view of education. &quot;The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,&quot; he said.&apos;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Surio</author><text>While context also has some part to play, in general I am with you in what you are trying to say.&lt;p&gt;BTW, are fictional characters counted as references? ;-)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Knowledge_and_skills&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Knowledge_and_s...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;From that article,     &lt;i&gt;In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes claims he does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, as such information is irrelevant to his work. Directly after having heard that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it. He says he believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and so learning useless things would merely reduce his ability to learn useful things.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Somewhat relevant (and OT) comic... &lt;a href=&quot;http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know</title><url>http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40F10FB355B1B7A93C3A8178ED85F458285F9</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>loboman</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison-education.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.pangeaprogress.com/1/post/2010/09/einstein-edison...&lt;/a&gt; &apos;While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. (...) A reporter asked him a question from the test. &quot;What is the speed of sound?&quot; If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not &quot;carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.&quot; Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison&apos;s view of education. &quot;The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,&quot; he said.&apos;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>run4yourlives</author><text>Thomas Edison invented the cylindrical Phonograph, and movies were beginning to just show up in 1921. I&apos;d imagine knowing the speed of sound - especially how it relates to syncing with video - was of major importance to him, much more than it was to Einstein.&lt;p&gt;Context is everything.</text></comment>