The Geeks' Guide to World Domination
Page 15
FOUR RECIPES USING ONLY FLOUR, BUTTER, EGGS, MILK, AND WATER
Look in your pantry (pantry, n.: a small, closed space connected to a kitchen, often with a door, in which food and utensils for food preparation can be stored). Perhaps a previous tenant left flour. Check for weevils. Open your refrigerator. Any chance it contains eggs, milk, and butter? If so, read on, dear geek. The goodness of cooked food is only minutes away.
MOVIES FOR THE MATHEMATICALLY MINDED*
If you're reading this book, there's a better-than-not chance you've seen the movie (or read the book) A Beautiful Mind. Maybe you also remember Good Will Hunting and have perhaps heard of the movie Proof. But where, outside these big-name films, can you go for your fix of big-screen math scenes? Don't despair—simply watch one of the following movies today:
PI (1998)
A man goes bonkers while contemplating the mathematic, scien-tific, and theological implications of the number pi. Oh, and he's pursued by people who want to kill him.
STAND AND DELIVER (1987)
A high-school math teacher teaches inner-city kids calculus.
DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (1995)
Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are given a five-and a three-gallon jug and must put exactly four gallons of water on a scale to keep a bomb from exploding.
I.Q. (1994)
Meg Ryan, playing Albert Einstein's niece, writes the Schrödinger equation describing the space-and time-dependence of quantum mechanical systems on a chalkboard (reason #1 why we love Meg).
INFINITY (1996)
This Richard Feynman biopic includes a calculating race between the scientist and a dude with an abacus. Feynman, using pencil and paper, adds slower, but multiplies faster and kills in the cube root competition (reason #1,243,891 why we love Feynman).
* Courtesy of Arnold Reinhold at mathinthemovies.com.
THINGS YOU WILL FIND WHEN YOU MISTYPE “MIT” INTO A SEARCH ENGINE
• MTI Whirlpools: “Design Your Experience.” Offering surround-sound bathing.
• Motorsport Technologies, Inc: The ultimate source for performance parts, products, and high-performance engines.
• Three Mile Island Alert: Outcome and analysis of the accident and a current problems discussion.
• Too Much Information Comics: A Web comic starring Ace, a young geek that's [sic] been kicked out of the house by his mom.”
• Indiana Transportation Museum: Home of the nickel-plate steam locomotive No. 587.
• Integrative Manual Therapy: Using the interconnectedness of multiple body systems, therapists assist the body's own innate intelligence to take corrective action.
• Morgan Stanley Insured Municipal Trust: the stock quote.
BEACHES AT WHICH YOU ARE MOST LIKELY TO BE EATEN (BY SHARKS)
According to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Americans do not need a passport in order to experience a shark attack firsthand—the United States leads the world in number of confirmed unprovoked shark attacks with 837. Compare this to Australia's 329 and South America's scant 100 to fully appreciate the USA'S global dominance in being gnawed upon by toothy fish.
NEW SMYRNA BEACH, FLORIDA
New Smyrna Beach's official city motto is “Catch the charm,” but most people know it as the shark attack capital of the world. Luckily the sharks in question are only spinners and blacktips, which, while they may take frequent bites, tend to take small ones (though the New Smyrna Beach tourist board is unlikely to adopt the motto, “Oh, it's only a little shark bite” anytime soon).
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
The highest number of attacks is on the east coast, but the most fatalities are in the south where seal concentration and thus great-white numbers are higher. Take your pick. Attacks in Brisbane include the 2006 fatality of Sarah Kate Wiley, who was attacked by three bull sharks in chest-deep water.
GANSBAAI, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
Tourists flock to the area known as Shark Alley to cage-dive with great white sharks. Without the cage, you are simply lunch. YouTube is rife with footage of Gansbaai sharks.
KOSI BAY, SOUTH AFRICA
The Zambezi sharks of Kosi Bay are known for their forays into fresh water inlets in search of fish. They are also known for eating people.
THE RED TRIANGLE, CALIFORNIA
Bolinas, Stinson, and Point Reyes beaches just north of San Francisco are the chomping grounds of a massive concentration of great white sharks (the Red Triangle extends as far south as Big Sur). In fact, more than half the documented great-white attacks on humans have occurred within the Red Triangle.
NORTH SHORE, OAHU, HAWAII
The Banzai Pipeline is also Buffet Human. Fatal attacks include Courtney Marcher, who was never found, though her surfboard leash showed bite marks.
PRAIA DE BOA VIAGEM, RECIFE, BRAZIL
South America's hottest spot to see and be seen being eaten (forty-seven attacks since 1992, sixteen of which were fatal). South of Recife, two bull-shark birthing estuaries were sealed off to construct a shipping port, forcing the sharks into tourist waters.
THE DIGITAL PINHOLE CAMERA AND THE END OF ART
What do you do after art has broken all the rules—when the time-tested systems no longer apply? In music, after Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, tonality was dead—just listen to the rhythmic closing minute, which is better understood using the vocabulary of techno or Hendrix-esque distorted noise than the rules of Western tonal music. No longer bound by the traditional rules, composers were forced to create their own. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg explored serialism, Cage threw out the bathwater (and some would say the baby), continuing with the chaos of his own imagination, while Stravinsky went retro in search of rules, imposing upon himself the constraints of J. S. Bach (though Stravinsky's neoclassicism retained just enough cool modern twists to define it as a distinct product of the mid-twentieth century.)
So too with photography: through the discipline's history, artistic photographers have been limited by images in the physical world—even with burgeoning manipulations, they have depended on existing images as starting points. No longer. Today, photographers are almost completely free of the rules imposed by the real world (for an early example, image search “shark attacks helicopter”). What do we do without rules?
Like Stravinsky, some modern art photographers are mining the art form's history, imposing upon themselves the constraints of yesterday's technology (and as with Stravinsky, the combination of old techniques with modern twists results in something distinctly new and distinctly today).
Enter the pinhole camera, which was conceived as early as the fourth century B.C. as Aristotle and Euclid watched light patterns filter through a wicker basket. To impose the constraints of the pinhole on your multi-megapixel world is actually quite simple—just drill a hole in your lens cap and leave it on (best with an SLR, as some point-and-shoots won't allow you to power on with the lens cap in place). The cleanliness of your pinhole makes a major difference, so either use a very sharp drill bit or cut your hole carefully with an X-Acto knife. For even better results, drill a rather large hole in your lens cap and then cover it with self-adhesive aluminum foil wrap (or glue it on). Use a pin to punch a hole in the aluminum wrap.
Images from pinhole digitals offer a large depth of field. They can also be artfully fuzzy—recalling Time magazine shots from the 1950s or modern images from a scanning electron microscope.
EIGHT U.S. TOWNS WITH SEXUALLY EXPLICIT NAMES
Beaver Lick, Kentucky
Hooker, Arkansas
Cumming, Georgia
Tingle, New Mexico
Horneytown, North Carolina
Short Pump, Virginia
Threeway, Virginia
HooHoo, West Virginia
International Honorable Mentions:
Dildo, Newfoundland, Canada
Fucking, Austria
TWO IMPORTANT SUGGESTIONS FROM THE WORLD ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS SOCIETY'S RESP
ONSIBILITY CODE
• Safety First! Always ensure that all players have removed sharp jewelry and watches.
• Think twice before using RPS for life-threatening decisions.
CLONE YOUR PET IN FIVE (NOT SO) EASY STEPS
In 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a Texas woman had paid $50,000 to become the first bereaved pet owner to have her recently deceased pet cloned. “I see no difference between Nicky and Little Nicky,” said Julie (last name withheld for reasons that should be obvious). Of course, counting this the first case of pet cloning belittles the historical significance of Louis Creed's cat, Winston Churchill, or simply Church to his young daughter, Ellie. After Louis buried the recently flattened Church in the back of the sematary, Church returned to the Creed family, but something was amiss. The kitty was evil.
The question is: Is Little Nicky evil too?
There is suspiciously little mention of the continuing life of the mysterious Texan “Julie” and her little fur-ball of undead joy. Is the pair living happily, below the radar of the press, or was Julie quietly killed and eaten by the zombie cat? We may never know.
While the ethical and moral questions of cheating death itself are up for debate, cloning is undeniably a neat trick. You, too, can clone higher mammals by following these steps:
1. Capture nuclei from donor cells: Mechanically extract nuclei from the cells of your recently deceased pet by poking through cell walls with a very, very small syringe. Any nonreproductive cells will work.
2. Gather unfertilized eggs of same species. The technology for harvesting donor eggs has been around for years.
3. Switch nuclei: Use another tiny syringe to extract the nucleus from a harvested egg and replace it with a nucleus from your deceased pet. Currently, it may take many hundreds of attempts to do this without destroying the egg's viability.
4. Implant eggs into surrogate womb: Again, many of these eggs will not survive. If one does survive, it will mature in the womb.
5. Voilà! You now have a pet that is genetically identical to its donor.
PING-PONG DIPLOMACY
Before Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China, widely seen as the beginning of China's reintroduction into global politics and economics and thus the beginning of the end of Western civilization's world domination, there was Ping-Pong.
The year was 1971, and the U.S. table tennis team was in Japan for the Thirty-first World Table Tennis Championships, getting roundly thumped by almost anything with two arms and a paddle. (To be fair, Leah “Miss Ping” Neuberger had achieved much international success, winning the 1956 World Mixed Doubles Championship.) One evening, the young player Glenn Cowan, described by a fellow teammate as a “hippie opportunist,” missed the team bus. Instead, he hopped a ride with the Chinese team and struck up a friendship with the three-time world champion, Zhuang Zedong. When they stepped off the bus, waiting paparazzi ensured that the story became instant world headlines.
is the king of sexually explicit town names with Balltown, Big Beaver, Blue Ball, Climax, Desire, Intercourse, and Virginville. Who says the Amish are humorless?
Soon after, Mao Zedong (no relation) invited the nine American team members to visit mainland China to play the role of Washington Generals to the Chinese team's Harlem Globetrotters. Time magazine called it “the ping heard round the world.” Between severe Ping-Pong beatings, the U.S. team toured the Great Wall, chatted with factory workers, and attended the Canton Ballet. On the day of the team's gala banquet held in the Great Hall of the People, the United States lifted its twenty-year trade embargo with China.
SIXTEEN CLASSIC BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS BOOKS
Looking for riveting summer reading? If you are a true business geek, these books will fit the bill; if not, don't even consider opening these without stocking up on Super Glue and preplacing those eyelid toothpicks.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (1936)
• The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)
• Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman (1962)
• Foundations of Economic Analysis, by Paul Anthony Samuelson (1983)
• The Functions of the Executive, by Chester I. Barnard (1938)
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker (1985)
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey (1989)
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes (1936)
• History of Economic Analysis, by Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1954)
• The Human Side of Enterprise, by Douglas McGregor (1960)
• Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1940)
• Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming (1982)
• In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. (1982)
• Good to Great, by James C. Collins (2001)
• My Years at General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1963)
• An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)
THE SEVEN BEST COLLEGE PRANKS OF ALL TIME, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
THREE BILLION- DOLLAR BUSINESSES THAT STARTED IN GARAGES
One of the great mysteries in the evolution of human technology is the origin of the first garage, for the garage itself is a necessary component of innovation. Sure, in a pinch, a basement or a laboratory will work, but only due to their approximation of garage-ness. So how then was the first garage invented without there already being a garage in which to invent it? Many point to this paradox as evidence of a supreme power. No matter the origin, the businesses below have taken full advantage of the creative powers of the garage.
GOOGLE
In 1996, search engines scoured Web pages looking for users’ search terms. A page in which the terms appeared five times would rank higher than a page in which the terms appeared four times. So, if you were selling inflatable chairs, you could guarantee strong search listings by including the words “inflatable chair” as many times as possible in your site's text, which to most visitors creates a rather uninspiring site. Larry Page and Sergey Brin hypothesized that a better way to rank search results was to explore the backlinks from other relevant sites, thus returning search results ordered by what the Internet already “knew.” If they had been able to spell, the company they started in their friend's Menlo Park garage would have been called Googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeros). Their company's name is now a verb.
APPLE
In 1976, Steve Jobs sold his VW bus to buy circuitry. Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne assembled these Frankensteinian electronics into Apple I's on a workbench in Jobs's parents’ garage. The two hundred computers of this first generation required users to connect transformers to supply two different AC voltages, purchase separately and then attach a keyboard, rig some type of (unincluded) monitor, and perhaps nail together a box to house the monstrosity. The more user-friendly Apple II stored information on cassette tapes. Now we have the iPhone.
HEWLETT-PACKARD
Silicon Valley itself was born in a 12 × 18 garage, leased for $45 a month by Dave Packard and William Hewlett in 1938. Their startup cash: $538 (just over $7,000 in today's dollars). They flipped a coin to decide whose name would come first. In the true spirit of alchemist tinkerers, Hewlett and Packard jumped from invention to invention until finally deciding to focus on electronic test and measurement equipment. Disney bought eight of HP'S 200A audio oscillators to test audio equipment for the movie Fantasia. The oscillator's inexpensive price of $54.40 was a reference to the 1844 slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” which was used to bully Canadians into a border treaty.