by Garth Sundem
But computers don't conform to the evolution of human bone structure. They can only count to two. (Technically, they can only count to one, starting at zero.) This is binary. To count in binary, use your first two fingers—every time you would raise the second finger, add another one in a column to the left. Here are binary representations of decimal numbers: 1 = 1, 2 = 10, 3 = 11, 4 = 100, 5 = 101, 6 = 110, 7 = 111, 8 = 1000, 9 = 1001. In practice, computers are a bit more sophisticated than coding in unadorned binary numbers. Instead, characters are assigned specific codes within an 8-bit system (for example in the standard language of ISO 8859-1, the character R is coded with the pattern 01010010). Because there are eight places of two choices each, there are 256 possible combinations and thus 256 possible character codes. (The ASCII code uses 7 bits and thus offers 128 possible characters.)
If binary is decimal truncated, hexadecimal is decimal expanded, adding the “digits” a, b, c, d, e, and f to the numbers 0–9 to create a base-16 system. As you have probably guessed, to count in hexadecimal, every time you reach sixteen, add a placeholder in a column to the left. Here are hexadecimal representations of binary numbers: 15 = f, 20 = 14, 30 = 1e.
Here's the cool thing about hexadecimal: it works as shorthand for binary. One digit in hexadecimal holds as much information as four binary bits—so instead of 1101, programmers can simply write d.
ATTRACTING SEARCH ENGINE ATTENTION
There it is: your new e-business site, complete with a killer shopping cart, secure online payment, your earth-shattering catalog of ten thousand widgets, professional graphics, database compatibility, interactive Flash animations, and all sorts of other coolness. The problem is that only you and your dog know it exists. Follow the steps below to get the word out.
1. Write a twenty-five-word, search-term-rich description of your site and submit it to free and/ or pay search engines and directories (Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com, etc.—instructions found by searching “submit to X”).
2. Make your site dynamic. If you update or at least change content frequently, search engines recognize your site as active. Consider adding a newsletter or blog to your site and submitting content via RSS feed to relevant news sites.
3. Links: trade links with relevant (high quality) sites, and make sure the anchor text of your links includes useful, relevant keywords. Consider getting an initial search-engine boost by buying links to pages with high page-ranks. Post to blogs and forums with links back to your content. Also, make sure all your links are current.
4. Consider pay-per-click marketing with Google or Yahoo (and be sure to track and calculate how much these clicks are worth to you in sales).
5. Gather customer e-mail addresses to which you can submit a newsletter. Offer a way on your site for visitors to submit their contact information and consider paying for advertising on existing, relevant e-zines or buying a customer list. Once you have a high-volume site with a vibrant and widely read newsletter, you can sell advertising space to tomorrow's little fish.
6. Beware any marketing service offering black-hat techniques such as link farms and keyword stuffing, which sound good and can boost your hits in the short term but will eventually result in search engines banning your site.
WHAT'S SO FRICKING COOL ABOUT THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT?
In 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) succeeded in mapping the more than three billion base pairs in the human genome (the sequence of human DNA). So far, researchers have sifted through this mass of data to define over twenty thousand genes with an estimated one hundred still lurking in the database. (In case you're getting a big head from the perceived complexity of our species, our number of genes is nearly two hundred times fewer than that of the single-celled Amoeba dubia). The HGP database has been dumped online and is now readily available to anyone interested in mining for information as part of a Ph.D. program or, say, in hopes of global domination through manipulating the very fabric of life itself.
But what has sequencing the genes of some dude from Buffalo, New York, done for us lately? (Besides providing the research funding necessary to transform major portions of the Garden State into an industrialized biotech belt.)
For starters, due to the HGP we are currently able to test much more accurately for genetic predisposition to diseases, including cystic fibrosis, liver disease, and breast cancer. The HGP database also provides a nexus for genetic researchers, organizing all known information about specific genes. This might not sound like much, but if you were a researcher who had tracked a cancer to a certain gene, by visiting the HGP database you could explore all other research done on this gene. Also, the techniques of genomics developed during the project allow more efficient research into the genomes of other living creatures—ones we can more ethically manipulate for the good of the world and/or domination thereof.
The future, though, is limitless (according to researchers in New Jersey who promise everything from everlasting life to the flying car, if only the money keeps flowing). Future applications are likely to include gene therapy (treating the underlying causes of disease rather than their symptoms), ge-nomic manipulation of microbes for use in biofuels and carbon sequestration, precision exploration of evolution, the end of question marks in forensics, and supercows, which may or may not provide a viable transportation alternative to the flying car.
THE BENDS:* RULES FOR DECOMPRESSION
Believe it or not, the equation PV = nRT is included nowhere else in this book. In short, this equation relates pressure and volume to amount of stuff and temperature: If you pack more stuff into a box, the pressure inside the box increases; if you heat up the same box, the pressure increases, too; but if you move the stuff from this box to a bigger one, the stuff spreads out and pressure decreases. Interestingly, PV = nRT also means that when you quickly and dramatically decrease pressure, stuff can go from a liquid to a gas (because a gas has more volume and when pressure goes down, stuff spreads out to take up the extra space). Unfortunately for divers and those experiencing a loss of cabin pressure at thirty thousand feet, when the pressure drops, the liquid nitrogen in their blood changes quickly to gas, causing massive badness, including but not limited to death.
To prevent the bends, don't ascend too quickly while diving and avoid flights likely to catastrophi-cally lose pressure. If you come up slowly, the microbubbles that form in your blood will be naturally expelled through your lungs. If you ascend too quickly, larger bubbles can form, blocking blood flow to your brain (contraindi-cated by the surgeon general). How slowly you must ascend from a dive depends on your maximum depth and the time you spend there. According to the U.S. Navy, you can spend up to 200 minutes at a depth of 40 feet with the recommended ascent speed of 1 ft/sec making 40 seconds of total ascent time. If you had spent this same, 200-minute dive at 60 feet, on your ascent you would need to spend a 69-minute decompression stop floating at 10 feet. If you spent just 80 minutes at 140 feet, you would need to spend just over 155 total minutes ascending, with stops at 40, 30, 20, and 10 feet.
* Not to be confused with the second studio album of the English band Radiohead.
A SAM LOYD MATHEMATICS PUZZLE
A trained cat and dog run a race, 100 feet straightaway and return. The dog leaps three feet at each bound and the cat but two, but then she makes three leaps to his two. Now, under those circumstances, what are the probabilities or possibilities in favor of the one that gets back first?
powerful think Tanks And Their Ideologies
It is every geek's dream to join a think tank and thereby rule the world with nifty numbers and influential ideas—for no think tank is completely without agenda. John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis (not to be confused with the Emmy-winning actor of the same name, best known for his role as the beer-swilling husband on the TV series Roseanne) evenhandedly describes the difference in approach of first-rate liberal versus conservative think tanks, saying, for example, “The Brookings Institution is more likely to investigate unmet need
s and ask what governmental programs could solve this problem. The NCPA [National Center for Policy Analysis] is more likely to investigate how government policies are causing the problem in the first place and ask how the private sector can be utilized to solve it.” More partisan think tanks, such as Seattle's Discovery Institute write, for example, about their “belief in God-given reason and the permanency of human nature” in their mission statements. On the other end of the political spectrum, the Tellus Institute hopes to “advance the transition to a sustainable, equitable, and humane global civilization.”
But just how left and how right are these shadowy think tanks that control law, public policy, and thus the world as we know it? The best—but certainly not flawless—answer comes from a 2005 study by Tim Groseclose (UCLA/Stanford) and Jeff Milyo (Harris School Public Policy, University of Chicago), who used newspapers’ citation rates of various think tanks to judge media bias (positing that if a newspaper cites a conservative think tank more than they cite a liberal one, the paper itself is more conservative). Of course, to explore media bias via their citation rates of think tanks, Groseclose and Milyo had to first define the relative conservatism/liberalism of the think tanks themselves. Generally their methodology states that because we can fairly accurately describe the political leanings of members of Congress (by Americans for Democratic Action scores), we should be able to describe the leanings of a think tank by how often these politicians cite it (if politician X is always blathering on about the findings of think tank Z, it's likely they share ideologies). Here are the Groseclose/Milyo rankings of the twenty think tanks most cited by Congress, from most liberal to most conservative (Groseclose, T., and J. Milyo 2005, “A Measure of Media Bias,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120 (4):1191–1237):
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Children's Defense Fund
Economic Policy Institute
AARP
Amnesty International
Common Cause
The RAND Corporation
The Brookings Institution
The ACLU*
The Cato Institute
American Enterprise Institute
National Taxpayers Union
Citizens Against Government Waste
Alexis de Tocqueville Institute
National Federation of Independent Businesses
Center for Security Policy
National Right to Life Committee
Heritage Foundation
Family Research Council
* The Web lights up with criticism of the ACLU'S placement as slightly right of center. Groseclose/Milyo explain this placement as the result of the ACLU'S opposition of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance bill, which congressional conservatives cited very often, skewing the results. Are other results skewed as well? Decide for yourself. (Groseclose and Milyo, both former fellows at conservative think tanks, calculated an overall liberal bias in the media, with print leaning substantially left of TV and radio.)
EVERYDAY APPLICATIONS OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanics has allowed us to more accurately describe the world—especially the very, very tiny bits of it. The field also helps us describe and predict interactions between elements, forming the theoretical basis of quantum chemistry. And quantum mechanics influences study in other fields as well, ranging from string theory to cryptography to computer science. But what does this mean to you and me? What current gadgets depend on quantum mechanics? Perhaps most important, could quantum mechanics one day lead to a viable flying car?
In fact, a good percentage of the things you plug into the wall depend on quantum mechanics. Specifically, lasers and microprocessors would be impossible without our understanding of atomic function, first put forward by Niels Bohr in 1913. Basically, they depend on light emitted as a byproduct of excitable electrons jumping in and out of various orbits around their more steadfast protons. For the laser, this light is the goal, and for microprocessors, it is a conduit for information. Fiber optics, solar cells, even the little LED lights on your reading lamp depend on quantum mechanics (really, all of electricity itself depends on quantum mechanics, though in Edison's case invention came from tinkering rather than from quantum understanding). In a more high-tech example, to display images at the atomic level, the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) uses quantum tunneling, in which electrons’ ability to act as waves as well as particles allows them to pass through (as well as reflect from) seemingly impenetrable substances. The STM translates this quantum bounce-back and tunneling into pictures.
Note: if there is any hope for a viable flying car, it will likely include quantum-influenced gadgets. However, cynics expect tele-portation first, and possibly flying pigs.
AT-HOME EYE EXAM
Have years of monitor viewing blended your optical rod cells into slurried mush? Or perhaps your myopic vision is due to late nights spent reading manga by the light of a single LED held tented under your covers? Still, there remains hope that you, dear geek, have bucked the odds of your caste and retain ocular function. Wanna find out? Due to Hermann Snel-len, you can.
Snellen's chart, which he developed in 1862, is rather deceptively low-tech; what looks at first to be a receding series of random letters is actually quite specific, including the set height and width of letters at exactly five times the width of the line used to draw them (and the width of this line equaling the gap in the letter C). Snellen's goal was to measure a person's sight relative to what a normal cross section of the population can see; thus, 20/20 vision means you see stuff at 20 feet that most people see at 20 feet and 20/40 vision means that what you see at 20 feet, others see at 40 feet (and means you should consider increasing the font size with which you usually interact).
To get a very rough estimate of your visual acuity, hold this book at arm's length (or otherwise place it about 2.5 feet from the tip of your nose), cover one eye, and start reading letters from the top. The smallest row you can accurately read determines your acuity. While each state is different, if you have less than 20/40 vision in both eyes, you may have to jump through hoops to receive a driver's license; if neither eye is better than 20/100, you may not be able to get one. If your maximum acuity is no better than 20/200, you are legally blind.
FROM THE OFFICIAL RULES OF ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS*
3.1.1. The player who has initiated the prime is under the strict obligation to maintain a constant priming speed so as to give his opponent every opportunity to “catch the prime.”
3.2.0 The fist must remain in the closed position until the delivery of the final prime. The fist is the only acceptable hand position during the prime.
3.3.0 The fist must remain in full view of the opposing player and may not come in contact with any outside influences that inhibit the opponent's view.
3.3.0. Prior to the delivery of the final prime, the game may be called off for the following reasons only: rule clarification, decision clarification, or injury.
* Courtesy of the World RPS Society.
SIX SOMEWHAT FIENDISH CHESS PROBLEMS
As long as chess has existed, serious players have found themselves without partners to play with, late at night. Desperate times call for desperate measures, which result in the problems below.
THE CLASSIC PONZI SCHEME
Before spam, phishing, packet interception, and other technology-assisted mugging, before the credit protection feature on your new card and before the sub-prime, variable-rate mortgage, before the Internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore's eye, there was the Ponzi scheme: investment in something without worth, with too-good-to-be-true dividends paid by using capital from later investors. Charles Ponzi's original scheme (Ponzi wasn't actually the inventor, just a very brash downstream user) was buying postal coupons—basically, the promise of a stamp—in a country where postage was cheap and then redeeming these coupons in the United States, where postage was expensive. It sounded great—the only problem was, it didn't
work: too much red tape and too many logistics. But this didn't stop Ponzi from publicizing his Great Idea, and it certainly didn't stop people from investing in it. Ponzi waved his magic wand, promising that investors would double their money in ninety days. And he paid his first few investors, creating a massive buzz in a 1920s Boston that was newly gaga over investments of all sorts. About forty thousand investors contributed today's equivalent of $150 million. In fact, Ponzi had only invested about $30 in postal coupons. Unfortunately, after the Boston Post questioned the validity of Ponzi's scheme, enough people demanded their money back to sink the ship. Ponzi went to jail.
Maybe you've seen this incarnation of the Ponzi scheme:
Send five dollars to the first name on this list. Then cross out this name and add your name to the bottom of the list. Mail this letter to six friends. In a matter of months, you will receive thousands of dollars!
