The Geeks' Guide to World Domination

by Garth Sundem

  In the Phillipines, the sea-dwelling Bakunawa eats the sun or moon during eclipses; in Japan, the snakelike Ryu grants wishes (à la Neverending Story); Fafnir, an Old Norse lindworm, killed his father for want of gold; Smok Wawelski used to maraud around the Polish countryside causing the general badness you would expect of a dragon; the Hungarian Sárkány loses power as it loses heads; and beware Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican dragon that is due to make another appearance in 2012, when it will destroy and thus re-create the world.

  SECURITIES SAVINGS ACCOUNTS: IRA VS. 401(K) VS. MUTUAL OR INDEX FUND VS. BONDS

  HACKING 101

  “Bingo,” sniffed acne-prone seventeen-year-old computer whiz Harvey Schlep. “We're in.” Harvey proceeded to divert Microsoft's 2020 profits into an offshore account in the Caymans, spam the whereabouts and results of the U.S. government's extraterrestrial interrogation program all over cyberspace, and remotely activate and stream all in-computer webcams of female MySpace users between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.

  This is every hacker's dream. The reality is a bit grittier.

  Basically, to be an Internet hacker, you need to be smarter and more creative than the person doing the initial programming. And this programming draws on the massive combined expertise of security companies under the umbrellas of huge companies like Microsoft, Google, and the U.S. government. Generally speaking, the combined wisdom of these institutions trumps your measly Linux/C++ expertise. However, like Neo, you might be different. You, like Chuck Yeager, might have the right stuff.

  The crux of hacking is (of course) finding a way into a remote computer. This can be through the front door, using the target's password (gained by phishing for it, intercepting it in transit, or other less high-tech techniques, such as trash sifting and/or getting the target extremely inebriated and then asking for it), or it can be through the back door, i.e., circumventing a system's security. In the latter case, you can depend on your target to download, install, or otherwise place a rigged application on the system, thus accidentally compromising it himself (using a Trojan horse, virus, or worm), or you can try to force your way into the target's system (for example, using a vulnerability scanner to scroll through known security weaknesses).

  But the true art to hacking lies in the ability to recognize and exploit unknown security weaknesses. To do this, you will need to know how to program. In fact, you will need to know how to program very, very well. It takes years of expertise and, like the aforementioned Neo, the ability to see through thousands of lines of code into the Matrix itself, where there may or may not be holes.

  FOUR CLASSIC TYPES OF RAT MAZE

  THE CLASSIC RAT MAZE

  A mouse/rat starts at an entrance and makes its way through the expected twists, turns, dead ends, and splits until reaching a reward at the maze's end. Researchers measure speed and accuracy of subsequent passes to determine a rat's learning.

  THE RADIAL ARM MAZE

  A rat sits at the hub of tunnels that radiate like spokes away from it. Often food pellets are placed at the far end of each tunnel and researchers watch the rat to see if it remembers which tunnels it has already visited.

  THE MORRIS WATER MAZE

  In a tub of opaque water sit two small platforms, submerged only far enough to be invisible. A rat starts on one platform and researchers evaluate the rat's ability to swim to the other platform.

  T MAZE AND Y MAZE

  A rat travels along a corridor and then two paths diverge (frequently in a yellow wood). The rat chooses between these identical options.

  THE PREDICTIVE POWERS OF THE IOWA ELECTRONIC MARKETS

  Contango! That's what you could be yelling if you buy low and sell high in the futures market! (All in the comfort of your own home!)

  Basically, when you buy a “future” you are agreeing to buy stuff at a given price at a later date. If, for example, you buy futures in oil at a price of $89 per barrel, you have locked in this price for a future date, and if at that future date the actual price has followed the upward-sloping curve known as “contango” and is higher than $89, you win. (The opposite of contango is backwardation, which is not nearly as much fun to yell.) Here's how this works in the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM):

  You could have bought futures on the 2008 presidential election, choosing to be paid a dollar if the Dems won or a dollar if the Reps won. Based on current buyers and sellers, the price of these one-dollar futures varied. For example, when this market opened in 2006, Democratic and Republican shares sold for nearly 50¢ apiece (reflecting buyers’ fifty-fifty view of who would win). In 2007, after the Democrats cleaned up in the midterm elections, you could have bought a future payable on a 2008 Republican win for 31¢, but it would have cost you nearly 90¢ for a Democratic future.

  How, exactly, this differs from Internet gambling is anyone's guess.

  However, in addition to lining the winners’ pockets, the IEM has a surprising function: it predicts things. If, on election eve, the IEM shares for Democrats are selling higher than the shares for Republicans, there is a very, very good chance the Democrats are going to win (in fact, the IEM is consistently more accurate than professional polling data). And the IEM predicts more than just political races. In 2007, you could have bought futures on predicted Beowulf profits, on Microsoft's price level, or on the returns of the computer industry.

  Most observers credit the IEM's predictive accuracy to its ability to disentangle what people want from what people expect, thus measuring not only the wisdom of a crowd, but the wisdom of a crowd that has been forced to put its money where its mouth is. For example, you may be a committed Green Party voter, and on election eve you might wax poetic to a pollster about your candidate's chances, but would you really put a hundred dollars on Ralph Nader?

  MANGA, ANIME, AND THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

  The term manga was used in Japan as early as 1798 and refers simply to a comic strip (literally, “whimsical pictures”). Like any country's artwork, Japanese manga evolved an endemic set of artistic and stylistic values, notably influenced by kung fu, sci-fi, and robotics. When comic books hit TV and movie screens, manga's moving version became known as anime. Anime's hits in the United States include Po-kemon and Dragonball Z.

  For the most part, modern graphic novels skip the niceties of anime's kids series, instead connecting with the dark, fantastical side of manga. The modern graphic novel is effectively a thick comic book, usually with a complex story line and highly stylized black-and-white illustrations. While comic book publishers such as DC and Marvel were the first to embrace the genre, mainstream book publishers have jumped aboard, and some graphic novels have sold in excess of a hundred thousand copies.

  THE LESS-KNOWN FICTION OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  Unless you've recently arrived through a wormhole from some related but not wholly identical world, you know about The Lord of the Rings. It's likely you even know about the book's predecessor, The Hobbit. If you are an armchair Tolkien geek, you've heard of the Silmarillion, and if you are starting to stand out of said armchair, you've actually read it. But what about Tolkien's other works? The following list omits nonfiction and all works incomplete at the time of the author's death in 1973.

  • 1945—Leaf by Niggle

  • 1949—Farmer Giles of Ham

  • 1953—The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

  • 1962—The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

  • 1967—Smith of Wootton Major

  THE FOUR LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS

  Zeroth: If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.

  First: Energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. (The total amount of energy and matter in the universe is constant.)

  Second: The total entropy of a system tends to increase over time (especially if one is parent to toddlers).

  Third: Nothing can reach absolute zero, the state of zero entropy at which all
molecular motion ceases. If one did reach absolute zero, it would result in all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light and/or in the destruction of Gozer the Gozerian.

  ROBOGAMES AND OTHER ROBOTICS COMPETITIONS

  Every year since its inauguration in 2004, very serious geeks have gathered at the RoboGames in San Francisco, nominally to test their robots’ skills in Olympic-themed events such as the septathalon, weightlifting, and the marathon, but in actuality to see if their robot can kick others robots’ asses in various combat genres and weight classes. For example, in 2007 in the 340-pound weight class, the Canadian robot Ziggy thrashed the American robots The Judge and Vladiator to claim the gold medal.

  Tolkien died in 1973, he left behind a huge number of partial and unfinished manuscripts, spawning an entire academic field of Tolkienology, many of whose practitioners seem to have difficulty dissociating Middle-earth from English and Norse history and vice versa. Most notably the author's son Christopher Tolkien jumped into the field, editing much of the senior Tolkien's work. Between 1983 and 1996, Christopher Tolkien published a twelve-part history of Middle-earth, aptly titled The History of Middle-earth.

  Other, less overtly destructive robotics competitions include the following:

  •; International Aerial Robotics Competition: fully autonomous robots compete to complete simulated real-world tasks, such as searching a disaster scene, remote surveillance, and hazardous waste location and identification.

  •; DARPA Ground Challenge: Driverless cars compete to navigate a course in the shortest time possible. In 2007, the prize was $2 million.

  •; RoboCup: The stated goal of RoboCup is to create a team of autonomous humanoid robots that, by 2050, can beat the most recent human World Cup champions (playing by FIFA rules and without the use of other long-promised technologies such as jetpacks, laser guns, or the flying car).

  FUN QUOTES FROM THE WORLD'S TOP DICTATORS

  I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.

  —Fidel Castro while visiting New

  York City under Rudy Giuliani

  On the last day when I was speaking before the assembly, one of our group told me that when I started to say “In the name of God the almighty and merciful,” he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself.

  —Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after

  speaking to the United Nations

  General Assembly

  The devil came here yesterday and it smells of sulfur still today.

  —Hugo Chavez, speaking of

  George W. Bush to the United

  Nations General Assembly

  Our party must continue to strike fear into the heart of the white man, our real enemy.

  —Robert Mugabe in a December,

  2000, speech to ZANU-PF congress

  COOL INVENTIONS OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE

  NASA'S CENTENNIAL CHALLENGES

  If you're looking for an easy way to make your first million, look elsewhere. These challenges stump NASA rocket scientists. However, if you're looking for a good way to while away an engineering Ph.D. or for a fun basement project that will teach your kids the value of process-based rather than results-based inquiry, read on. These NASA challenges are meant to spur private-sector interest in solving the vexing problems of space colonization.

  MOON REGOLITH OXYGEN EXTRACTION CHALLENGE— $1 MILLION

  Hands-down, this prize has the coolest nickname: MoonRox. To win this “first to demonstrate” prize, you have to extract breathable oxygen from lunar regolith—the dust and broken rock covering the moon's surface.

  REGOLITH EXCAVATION CHALLENGE—$750,000

  Of course, in order to use moon regolith, one must first gather it. This sounds easy, but lunar regolith—mostly in the form of a glassy, jagged, frozen, four-foot-thick blanket—is an especially feisty substance. To win this head-to-head challenge, your team must excavate and deliver more regolith than other teams in a thirty-minute period.

  PERSONAL AIR VEHICLE CHALLENGE—$300,000

  Still looking for that flying car or jetpack? So are the entrants of this competition.

  BEAM POWER CHALLENGE— $900,000

  Even NASA has gone wireless. In this challenge, design teams beam power from a ground-based transmitter to a receiver on a “car” that must use this power to climb a tether (see Tether Challenge) to a height of fifty meters.

  TETHER CHALLENGE— $900,000

  In conjunction with the Beam Power Challenge, the Tether Challenge hopes to promote space elevator technology, specifically, a system by which people or materials could climb up a su-perstrong tether, leaving Earth's atmosphere. Though, to win this competition all you have to do is to create a tether that is at least 50 percent stronger than last year's winner.

  ASTRONAUT GLOVE CHALLENGE—$400,000

  This is a yearly head-to-head competition during which teams test their gloves in a variety of challenges, mostly focusing on dexterity, flexibility, durability, sensitivity, and effective contraception.

  LUNAR LANDER CHALLENGE—$2 MILLION

  This prize hopes to spur development of a craft that could ferry people and supplies from lunar orbit to lunar surface. To win, your craft has to take off vertically, fly for a set period of time, land, launch again, and return to its starting point.

  THE PREDICTIONS OF NOSTRADAMUS

  No more sifting through unsanitary goat knuckles, searching for abstractions in tea leaves, shaking the Mattel Magic 8 Ball, listening to Yellow Submarine backward, or trudging India's highlands in search of infamously reclusive gurus—instead, look no further for answers than Les Propheties, the 1555 work of Michel de Nos-tradame. Basically, Notradamus assumed that planetary alignment influenced world events. He correlated celestial configurations to concurrent events, and then calculated when the planets would again reach this alignment, predicting that, at that time, similar events would occur—this enhanced by trance-aided pseudoscholarly interpretation of existing sources, including Savonarola, Joachim de Fiore, the Bible, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the last of which had not yet been interpreted but were widely understood to be cool in a magically arcane sort of way.

  Though some naysayers point to “retroactive clairvoyance” (i.e., the interpretive clarity of hindsight), it is generally understood by readers of the Celestine Prophecy and frequent posters to the news pages of National UFO Reporting Center that Nostradamus successfully predicted the death of Henry II of France, the great fire of London, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon (and Hitler), the exile of Franco, the works of Louis Pasteur and Charles De Gaulle, and the Kennedy assassination (and perhaps the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well). For example, he writes of Henry II's death:

  The young lion will overcome the

  older one

  On the field of combat in a single

  battle

  He will pierce his eyes through a

  golden cage

  Two wounds made one, then he

  dies a cruel death.

  Henry II was killed in a jousting accident when a splinter from his younger opponent's lance snuck through the visor of his golden helmet, piercing his left eye and exiting his ear. Henry suffered for days before finally succumbing. Both jousters used shields embossed with lions. Spooky, huh?

  Unfortunately, Nostradamus also predicts massive earthquakes, World War III, and the rapidly approaching end of the world, so, generally speaking, very soon it will suck to be us.

  THE TRAGIC CASE OF LEE SEUNG SEOP

  On August 5, 2005, a twenty-eight-year-old South Korean man, Lee Seung Seop, died of exhaustion and dehydration-induced heart failure after sitting at an Internet café for fifty consecutive hours while playing the game StarCraft.

  MALE/FEMALE RATIO AND BAND TRIVIA FROM AMERICA'S TOP UNIVERSITIES

  FOUR PRETT
Y CONVINCING UFO SIGHTINGS

  CHICAGO O'HARE INCIDENT

  At 4:30 P.M. on November 7, 2006, United Airlines ramp employees were pushing back flight 446 bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. In their accounts of what followed, said employees denied huffing jet fuel. An unlit, saucer-shaped craft hovered over gate C-17 for nearly two minutes, during which time the ramp employees called pilots, supervisors, and other UA employees—nearly a dozen in all—who then watched the mysterious craft rocket up through the clouds. The FAA at first denied anything out of the ordinary, but after a Chicago Tribune reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the FAA had to admit that yes, they had received official reports, and no, they had no plans to investigate further. The story was reported on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR.