How do we measure one's knowledge? IQ seems a convenient way to codify a person's ability -- potential, that is, to learn and acquire knowledge. However, we have no convenient way of measuring a person's wealth of knowledge. Of saying that A knows a measurable amount with is greater than the amount known by B.
The first step is to create a unit of measurement for knowledge. I propose to call it the Cecil, after the Straight Dope's Cecil Adams. The Cecil, an amount of knowledge equivalent to one page's worth of knowledge. A thousand Cecils would make a Kilocecil, a thousand pages worth of knowledge, or roughly a book's worth. A Megacecil would be a million pages worth, the length of a thousand books.
So how do you know how many Cecil's worth of knowledge you have? Well, you need to tally up the amount of pages you've read. This includes printed books and web pages, magazines and sports pages. Everything written down anywhere is knowledge.
If you hear a lecture, get a transcript of it, and count how many pages it prints off as. Alternatively, assume that it takes an average of one minute's worth of speaking to fill a page, and count every minute you listen as one Cecil. An hour's worth? 60 Cecils.
Television is knowledge as well. But television includes visual as well as aural media, so it may be worth more Cecils depending on the content. If you watch a news program and get added content from text on the bottom of the screen, you may be accumulating one and a half or two Cecils rather than just one for every minute watched.
What about a song? Well, it depends on the song. Many songs repeat the same lyrics over and over again, but in others the artist sings or raps unique lyrics extremely quickly. Many songs also express meaning through the music itself and not lyrics, which can be harder to quantify. But in general, assume that no song can exceed more than two Cecils for every minute of playtime. Some songs may only be expressed as fractions of Cecils (See: Katy Perry's California Girls) or no Cecils at all (See: Every novelty song every written).
We also need to account for essentially valueless or repetitive information. How many times have you heard the same song, or seen the same news story on two different outlets, or seen a movie with a cliche plot?
Now you, like myself, have probably not been studiously recording how many pages you read per year. But you can make a rough estimate to figure it out. For a week, record the number of Cecil's worth of knowledge you take in. Multiply this by 52 and you can get a rough idea of how much knowledge you absorb in a year. Multiply this by the number of years you've been alive (childhood counts, you learn more as a kid than at any other time, it's just intangible knowledge like "Now I need to breathe in," and "Gravity is a persistent force which makes me fall on my butt when I try to stand up."). Then you can get a general idea of how many Cecils of knowledge you possess.
What is the usefulness of this measurement? Beyond the obvious bragging rights and nerd cred sure to come with exchanging Cecil values over the internet (as in, "Dude, my Megacecil count just hit 23. I am the boss of this town." "Sweet dude. That is just aces."), we can use the Cecil for more useful purposes. A politician might tout his knowledge of a certain subject in Cecils -- who are you going to vote for, the guy with 4 Megacecils worth of foreign affairs experience, or the guy with 8 Megacecils worth of John Wayne movie trivia?
Of course, we'll need a board to certify that self-reporting of Cecil values doesn't get out of hand. This board will be a cadre of dedicated information afficianadoes, well versed collectively in every topic of information imaginable. Disputes over Cecil values will be referred to board, which I am calling the "Elucidated Council," for rigorous vetting. Over the course of weeks, the Council and the prospective applicant will lock themselves in drafty but well appointed chambers beneath the Council's manor house in the Swiss Alps. Then, exhausted, they will emerge, and breathlessly tell the public, waiting with bated breath, the true measure of a man's Star Wars knowledge.
The Elucidated Council would need to be run by a man of unusual and broad cunning, a man who surpasses the Jack of All Trades by becoming a true master of all areas of inquiry. But where could we find such a man? Who among us could rise to the lonely task of administering the world's reckoning of knowledge?
Well, who else?
