Benefits of Useless Knowledge

I have experienced proof that useless knowledge may not be so useless after all: this past Wednesday and Thursday I attended an Apple technology training seminar for education, and at the end of the conference they had door prizes to award for answering Apple-related trivia questions. The prizes included some Apple t-shirts, mugs, pens, and several copies of Aperture, a $200 piece of photo-editing software. Most of the questions were related to content of the training sessions, but some were about Apple’s history. I knew about half the answers along the way, but I bided my time until the end when Aperture went on the block. Then came the question: ‘List all of the big cat names that Apple has used for OS X, in order of release.’ Yes! My hand shot into the air and I rattled off all 7 names: Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard. Most people familiar with Apple can probably name the last four or five, since those versions were all marketed to the public with the cat names, but Cheetah (OS X.0) and Puma (OS X.1) were only used as internal code-names, before Apple’s marketing department picked up on the big cat theme. And so, my otherwise useless knowledge garnered me a free copy of Aperture! Not bad for 10 seconds worth of work.