[ajross]

This is undeniably true, but I think misses an important correlation: in my experience, people who are best able to find and access "minor facts" like this when needed are precisely those who are commonly considered "walking encyclopedias". I strongly suspect this was true of Einstein too, even if he couldn't pull up that one figure.

I think penalizing someone for not knowing any fact in particular is silly. But throwing a ton of questions like this at a candidate just to see how many they hit has, IMHO, more value than is commonly admitted.