He can always look it up. If really I needed to know, that's what I'd do. But let's be honest, how often do you really need to know that? In fact, does the exact number really matter at all, except in some narrow legalistic sense? If I had to come up with an answer right now, I'd say "several hundred". As long as I know the House is not a small group like a cabinet or council,or committee, that's all I need to know about its size.

Now the Senate is easy, it's twice the number of states. But I do remember a time when there were only 48 of those. The flag looked different, too. Most easily quantifiable values are like this: irrelevant, and the precision you command misleads you into thinking you have real understanding. The exact number is overkill, and tells you nothing you don't already know, or can't quickly determine. Chronologies can be important, but their importance can also be exaggerated. Does it really matter if you're off in the date of a battle when what you really need to understand is why it was fought, and what difference it made. Sometimes, even who won was not important. Coral Sea was a tactical defeat for the US Navy, but a strategic victory. The same can be said for the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive. I was only a few miles away from that one, and I didn't even know it was going on. So much for the value of eyewitness testimony.

I'm good with multilevel, fuzzy things. For example, I can look at a historical drama and tell you if the clothes are appropriate for the time, to a very high accuracy, until I get back to around the beginning of the 17th century. After that my precision goes down. But even then, I'm still pretty good, although with less resolution, back to medieval times. I really don't know why, I've never studied, or even have any particular interest in, the history of costume. Maybe its because I've looked at an awful lot of old paintings, but I'm only guessing.

To a certain extent I can do this with English prose, as well. I can make blanket statements like, "that couldn't have possibly been written before the 1920s", not because of some historical or rhetorical reference or lack of it in the text, but simply by the style, the use of the language. There are a lot of things you can know and can't look up.

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to the things we know we don't know we know, and conversely, the things we think we know we couldn't possibly know. I especially wonder how they both influence the way we think and what we believe. I'm only just now getting to the point where when I find out something I know is wrong, I'm not totally surprised. I am especially interested in how much of our mental processing goes on at the subconscious level, that we are not even aware of. The example I like to use is you go into a bar and you know, you just know, there is going to be a fight. You can feel it. No, it's not ESP, you are picking up on real sensory clues and data, and integrating them into a fair forecast of what will happen, but you are not aware that you are doing it.

The more I look at the world the more complicated it gets, and the more beautiful, and the more uncertain. On the whole, I'm very happy about that. I've always suspected things seemed just a bit too easy. Now I can see it was just because I was too sure of myself.