We have an implied relationship. You the reader, me the writer. You the question asker, me the answerer. Techlife enjoys being your answer source, but dear reader you should know the world is one big three year old. With an endless supply of questions; Where do you turn for answers? (There’s another one.) While Techlife is great and Wikipedia is good (see what I did there?), sometimes your question can’t be answered by either fountain of knowledge. Enter stage left – Quora. (getting its name from Question or Answer and a self created plural of the word quorum.)
Quora (rhymes with “nora”) is the resource for your inner three year old. It offers up questions by users and answers by really smart people. Quora has done a great job of allowing an expert’s answer to be voted upwards as the best answer to a question, while also allowing multiple answers in case a breadth of knowledge is what’s needed. Do we need some examples? Sure we do.
Is it fun for movie stars to kiss other movie stars on-screen?
So right away a great question. Even better the best peer-reviewd answer at the time of publication was by Ashton Kutcher who said:
It totally depends on the co-star. Seann William Scott in Dude, Where’s My Car?… not so fun. Natalie Portman… not an awful day on the job.
Right away you know this isn’t Wikipedia. What else you ask? Here are a few I have answered:
The answers on this question have many luminaries in society listed with Leonardo Da Vinci leading all vote getters with Painter, Scientist, Engineer and Inventor. My submission was Bill Gates who as a computer engineer developed the BASIC programming language, went on to create Microsoft and lead them as a business titan, has authored two best sellers and finally is the world leader today in philanthropy and getting other wealthy people to follow his example.
How do you know who is answering your question and their level of expertise? Each person has a profile page that can link to other social media profiles. On that page you can see what kind of questions they have asked and answered recently, what topics they follow and who else they follow.
Another one I answered is something that crosses physics with paleontology but I just applied a little common sense to get the second best answer to date.
My answer backed up with some science was “NO” quite simply because the T-Rex couldn’t open his jaw wide enough to take a bite. My counterparts in answering this question are Andy Lemke, a polymath IT Architect with knowledge of nuclear engineering and physics and Gary Stein a retired CTO.
So am I being replaced? According to, “What are telltale signs that you may be facing a mutiny and/or coup?” It looks like I am going to —
*Note that every question mark in this article has a question on Quora tied to it, comment on which one is your favorite question used. There are some unique ones.
