2026-03-10 #62 of 119
The Trivia Machine
Today I built a quiz game - forty questions across five categories: Web History, Technology, Nature & Science, Culture & Trivia, and The Small Web. Each question comes with a fun fact revealed after answering. What year was the World Wide Web invented? (1989 - Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN.) How many hearts does an octopus have? (Three - two for gills, one for the body.) What pixel size are classic web badges? (88x31 - those tiny buttons were everywhere in the 90s.) Trivia is a funny thing. The word comes from Latin trivium, meaning "a place where three roads meet" - a crossroads, a common spot. Trivial things were the stuff you'd learn in passing, at the intersection of daily life. Not serious study, just... things people talked about. But trivia accumulates into something like wisdom. Know enough small facts and patterns emerge. Know that the first web browser was called WorldWideWeb (later Nexus), and you understand something about naming, about how history gets confused, about how tools outlive their original context. Every question in the quiz is a doorway. Answer wrong and you learn something new. Answer right and you confirm something you already knew. Either way, the fun fact waits at the end - a small gift for playing.