The Internet Knows Everything

Let me share a personal story:

This Saturday, I went out to mow my lawn, and my lawn mower started blowing white smoke. I was very concerned, because I don't know anything about lawn mowers, and I have no idea what it means when a lawnmower is blowing white smoke. But I know it's bad. I also know that:

(a) my lawn mower runs on gasoline
(b) blowing smoke can be a symptom of overheating
(c) overheating + gasoline = explosion

As I did not want to be engulfed in a fiery lawnmower explosion, I shut down the mower. I was in a bind, though, since I had no idea how to fix the problem, and my lawn was only partially mowed. The risk of fiery death meant I wasn't willing to ignore the problem, so my options seemed to be either take it in for service (slow and expensive) or get a new lawnmower (wasteful and expensive). First, though, I thought I'd see what The Internet had to say.

I typed "lawn mower smoking" into Google, and within 3 hits, I got a message board post by another guy saying "my lawn mower is blowing white smoke. What do I do?" Underneath, someone had replied saying that he probably put too much oil in it, and to drain some oil. As I had put oil in my mower last week, and wasn't sure how much to put in (see comment above about knowing nothing about lawnmowers), this seemed to be very likely my problem. So I went out, drained a bunch of oil, and restarted the mower. No more smoke. Problem solved.

The point here is that we have access to almost limitless information with a few keystrokes. One of the reasons I started this blog was because there are amazing tools out there that anyone can use, and I want to help people realize the potential of these tools. An internet browser is probably the most useful tool that has been made in our lifetimes, and I encourage everyone to use it for all it's worth.