by Garth Sundem
SEVEN MUST-SEE SIGHTS ON THE GEEK WORLD PILGRIMAGE
Microsoft Museum 4420 148th Ave NE, Building 127, Redmond, WA You are not allowed in the factory. Only in the museum. Where there are no Oompa-Loompas.
Legoland Jutland, Denmark The genesis of every civil or mechanical engineer's career. Don't miss the LEGO re-creation of the Kennedy Space Center.
Studio Ghibli Mitaka Inokashira Park, Tokyo Creator of My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, and more! Purchase tickets well in advance.
Palm Islands Dubai, United Arab Emirates A series of artificial, dredged-sand islands in the shape of palm trees. Palm Islands adds 520 K of beaches to the Dubai coastline.
Large Hadron Collider CERN, Geneva,
Switzerland (46°14¢ N, 6°03¢ E) Hopefully the LHC will help physicists find their God Particle, the theorized Higgs boson.
The Lubyanka Lubyanka Square, Moscow You, too, can take a tour of this former KGB headquarters, whose reputation for high-tech spy gadgetry is as emphasized as its history of torture is deemphasized. Deviating from the tour is not recommended.
Bollywoodrome Mumbai, India A specially designed set on the Filmistan lot that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Bollywood of yesteryear and the exciting directions of Bollywood today.
HOW TO LOAD A PAIR OF DICE
Warning: being caught with loaded dice can be highly dangerous both to you and to your role-playing characters.
Professionally loaded dice can be very, very slick. A popular model uses tunnels inside the dice, partially filled with soft wax; when a player breathes on, or tightly holds these wax-loaded dice, the wax melts, trickling downward and weighting the low side. This tunnel-based method of variable weighting can be accomplished with mercury or with a small magnet that is pulled through the dice tunnels by metal hidden in the table surface. In another, historically popular, method, dice were carved from a piece of wood that included a natural malformation, such as a pebble or spot of internal rot, thus showing no outward signs of tampering but being unequally weighted nonetheless. Ye t another method includes slightly rounding or sharpening dice edges, though this can be easier to spot. The lowbrow, high-risk approach uses dice with only certain numbers, for example one die with only 5's and another with 2's and 6's for use with craps (requiring bluster, quick pickup, and/or sleight of hand).
However, the easiest and most surprisingly successful method of loading plastic dice is to cook them, either in an oven or in a microwave, with the number you want facing up. The heat gently softens the plastic, which almost imperceptibly pools lower, leaving the downward side slightly heavier than its opposite.
IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT: JEREMY BENTHAM'S HEDONISTIC CALCULUS
As an ethical hedonist, the English utilitarian philosopher and proto-bleeding-heart-liberal Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) believed that right and wrong could be determined by weighing the “pleasures” and “pains” of any given action, with an action that produced more pleasure than pain being morally right. While this would be great by itself (in a geeky kind of way), what makes it truly spectacular is the fact that Bentham actually created an algorithm to define exactly how much pleasure and pain an action would cause. (His application of algebra to life decisions is echoed by at least one complete whack-job modern author….)
To determine an individual's pleasure or pain from an action, Bentham suggested weighing intensity (pleasure's strength), duration (how long pleasure would last), certainty (the probability that the action will result in pleasure), propinquity (how soon the pleasure might occur), fecundity (the chance that the pleasure would result in further actions), and purity (the probability these further actions would be pleasures and not pains). He also added extent, taking into account the effects of said decision on other people.
We can only guess at the specific algebra Bentham used to compare these variables, and he left no note of how to quantify, for example, intensity of pleasure, but he envisioned his hedonistic calculus used for many decisions, including calculating jail sentences: Given a certain crime, Bentham thought it possible to determine the punishment that would outweigh the crime's pleasure and thus prevent future crimes.
PENCIL-AND-PAPER ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: GENRES AND MAJOR EXAMPLES
NOTHING BUT A GIGOLO
When a male anglerfish of the superfamily Ceratiidae is born, the clock starts ticking. The little dude must find a female before his infant energy reserves expire, or he will die. When he finds a female anglerfish, he bites her. Then he releases an enzyme that dissolves her skin and his mouth, fusing himself to the female anglerfish at the vascular level (they share blood—she is his only source of nutrition). Forevermore, the male anglerfish is little more than a sperm packet and a slight bump on the otherwise streamlined and independent modern female anglerfish. Whenever she's in the mood, the female anglerfish releases a hormone into her (and thus the male's) bloodstream, inciting the male to release sperm, thereby downloading DNA whenever needed.
SLINKY TRICKS
There comes a point in every geek's life when basic slinkying just isn't enough. You've done the stair trick, you've done the retractable cubicle-to-cubicle throw, and now you're ready for the next step in slinky tricks.
As your first next step, try the thumb-to-fingers rock. Hold your hand palm-up and place the inert slinky over your thumb. Hold up your first finger and rock your hand to transfer the slinky to this finger. Rock back and repeat. The cachet of this trick is similar to that of thumb twiddling.
If, whenever you take the moving walkway through the United Airlines tunnel in Chicago O'Hare Airport, you find yourself transfixed by the Tron-like sounds, you'll love this one: Bite a couple coils in the middle of a metal slinky, plug your ears, and drop the two ends so they bounce freely. What do you hear? Consider playing Floyd in the background and/or synching the experience with Fantasia or the movie Baraka.
Next, two variations of the stair trick: try it hand-to-hand, using a motion that mimics cupping, raising, and releasing rolls of belly flab. How many hand-to-hand steps can you get? Also try stacking books to create slinky obstacle courses. One advanced skill is the slinky spiral staircase, which involves banked turns.
Finally, if you are stuck in the jungles of Southeast Asia with no exit strategy, consider using the following trick pioneered by the U.S. Marines—throw a slinky into a tree for use as a makeshift shortwave radio antenna.
famous slinky jingle (It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's a wonderful toy. It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun for a girl and a boy) was co-opted by the cartoon Ren & Stimpy which substituted the words It's Log, it's Log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood! It's Log, it's Log, it's better than bad, it's good!
A SAM LOYD MATHEMATICS PROBLEM
Here is a famous prize problem that Sam Loyd issued in 1882, offering $1,000 as a prize for the best answer showing how to arrange these seven figures and the eight dots so they would add up to 82: . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 0.
Out of several million answers, only two were found to be correct.
GREAT FEATS OF RUBIK'S CUBISM
In 1982, Knoxville, Tennessee, hosted the World's Fair. Over six months, more than 11 million people visited the city, mostly to see the large display of a Rubik's Cube, which ennobled the entrance to the fair's Hungary Pavilion. (Note 1: not the food court; note 2: it must have been the Rubik's Cube that drew crowds, because it certainly wasn't Cherry Coke, which debuted at the fair.) In the two years preceding the fair, the cube had sold 100 million units.
Fast forward to the present day. Granted, a 2 × 2 × 2 puzzle is fairly basic, but that doesn't negate the wonder of Lukasz Cialon's 1.01-second solving record. (Cryptically, his quote accompanying the record at www.speedcubing. com is “not LC. pzdr.” Is this cubist code?) Holding the record for the more standard 3 × 3 × 3 puzzle is Andrew Kang (7.12 seconds), who cut his speed-cubing teeth while working at a football concession stand. (“Out of nowhere a 7.12 pops up. I was spazzing like no o
ther.”) To date, the king of the Professor's cube (5 × 5 × 5) is Takayuki Ookusa, who rocked a 1:25.78 during the 2007 World Championship. (In fourth place in this category is Michael Gottlieb, who may or may not be the same as the well-known New York City lighting designer.)
The debate rocking the speed-cubing world is the relative meaning, for example, of a 7.12-second solve by someone whose average is otherwise well into the double digits. Certainly a lucky cube can be serendipitously set for success and self-submitted results are notoriously difficult to verify. For heroes, purists instead tend to look to the likes of Harris Chan, with his 10.64 average for 3 × 3 × 3 or Marc van Beest with his 50.65 average for 4 × 4 × 4. As of this writing, the world's top player in the traditional Rubik's Cube category is Ron van Bruchem of the cube-fertile Netherlands, who has also been one of the sport's great ambassadors.
As you could probably have guessed, speedcubers are prone to bouts of oversubmission to online video sharing sites, and thus many examples of freakishly quick Rubik's work can be seen on YouTube.com.
CHEMICAL EQUATION PUZZLES: IF THESE ARE FUN, YOU ARE A GEEK
Newton posited that matter is neither created nor destroyed. While any role-playing gamer with a mage capable of casting Meteor Swarm or Magic Missile knows this to be untrue, still, teachers of Chemistry 101 hold to Newton's idea when forcing on high-school and undergraduate students their narrow-minded approach to balancing chemical equations. However, we geeks don't much mind. Chemical equations are neat little math puzzles, and thus we will allow the world at large to retain its mistaken idea that chemical two-plus-two always equals four.
The first step in balancing a chemical equation is learning to read the equation itself. Elements are abbreviated as in the periodic table, and any subscript describes how many atoms of the preceding element are in a given molecule. (For example, H2O contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom—duh.) Reactants are listed before the arrow and chemical products are listed after the arrow. Take a look at the equation below in which natural gas (methane) reacts with oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water, as would happen on a common gas burner or if you hold a match near the back end of a cow:
On the surface, this all looks well and good, but on closer inspection, where the hell did the extra hydrogen go (there are four on the left and only two on the right) and where did we get that extra oxygen atom (there are two on the left and three on the right)? Were atoms created and destroyed by the level III mage in the sky? No, in fact, the imbalance of elements in this reaction means we need unequal numbers of each of these molecules to create a complete reaction. Here is the same equation, giving Newton the benefit of the doubt:
The coefficients of two in front of O2 and H2O mean there are two of each of these molecules (the coefficient applies to the entire molecule, not just the first element). Now we have the same amount of each element on the left as we do on the right. And thus is the balance of the universe restored.
Now, an example that looks tricky (but is not) in which calcium chloride reacts with silver nitrate solution to yield a white precipitate of silver chloride. (Notice the subscript 2 outside the parentheses—this means there are two complete NO3 “chunks” in this molecule, but it doesn't double the Ca as it would have if the two had been used as a coef-ficient.)
We can balance this equation using the following coefficients:
Now that you are an expert, try balancing the equations below (no fractions allowed in your coefficients, you slacker!):
BEWARE YOUR FOOD
The summer months are risky—in addition to shark attacks and boredom-related deaths due to midseason baseball, they're the time of food poisoning. If you live in Florida or California, you should be especially vigilant, as you are susceptible to all three (the most baseball teams, the most shark-infested beaches, and—according to the CDC—the most restaurant outbreaks of food poisoning, with a combined 143 in 2007). In all, the CDC estimates that food-borne diseases every year cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths (salmonella alone costs the United States upwards of $5 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity). One can only imagine the sheer volume of liquid effluvium generated by these 76 million people. (Actually we can do better than only imagining: A large tank truck of the kind commonly used to transport gasoline has a capacity of around 6,000 gallons; taking a conservative estimate of 0.5 gallons of effluvium per sickened person results in over 6,000 gasoline tankers per year filled with human waste materials due to food poisoning. No, no—no need to thank me.)
Especially virulent are the days surrounding the Fourth of July—heat-speeded bacteria-blooms, the ubiquity of meat products, and the overall unsanitary conditions of Uncle Sam's barbecue argue for renaming the event Uncle Salmonella's.
PHOENIX CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: “YES, BUT IT'S A DRY HEAT”
It is 50°F. If you live in Seattle, you're wearing a thick cable-knit under your hooded R.E.I. poncho and shivering uncontrollably despite your death grip on a Vente mochaccino. If you're in Boulder, Colorado, you're wearing shorts while adjusting the sun umbrella at an outdoor café on Pearl Street, waiting for your microbrew to arrive. (This, in a nutshell, is why Microsoft employees are so productive and why UC Boulder is a party school.) This difference in experience bespeaks the relative uselessness of mercury in determining temperature as experienced by human skin.
Being geeks, atmospheric scientists are aware of this problem and have developed various indices for use in transforming atmospheric data to better describe the temperatures we feel. Traditionally these indices add variables for wind chill (used to make cold temperatures colder) and humidity (used to make hot temperatures hotter). For example, the National Weather Service uses the following formula to compute degrees of wind chill (where T is the air temperature and V is wind speed):
And Heat Index is approximated with the following formula (R is relative humidity):
Fortunately, online calculators are available for both. In the year 2000, the private company Accu-Weather introduced the copyrighted equation RealFeel, which takes into account not only wind chill and humidity, but also solar intensity, precipitation intensity and type, elevation, and atmospheric pressure. Bravo, private-sector geeks, bravo!
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HARRY ANDERSON FROM NIGHT COURT?
Harry Anderson's magician schtick from the bench of Night Court was much more than mere schtick. In fact, before becoming an actor, Anderson worked as a street magician (thus making the list of comedians who have paid their dues, alongside the likes of Steve Martin). After Night Court, touring for post-Court spin-off stand-up gigs, and a couple successful TV character-acting jobs, Anderson in the summer of 2005—with near-presciently terrible timing—opened Oswald's Speakeasy, a nightclub in New Orleans's French Quarter, throwing open the doors just in time to welcome Hurricane Katrina. Though initially Anderson was a stalwart of the New Orleans reconstruction scene, in 2006 he and wife Elizabeth sold the speakeasy and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, citing as a reason, the reelection of mayor Ray Nagin.
According to the IMDb, Harry Anderson's first wife, Leslie, is a certified witch.
ULTIMATE FREEDOM: GOING COMMANDO
King Tutankhamun was buried with 145 loincloths. William Wallace wore no underwear at all. Is this reflective of their establishment versus antiestablishment views? Perhaps. Consider John Coltrane, who stopped wearing underwear at age eighteen, feeling that it restricted his artistic freedom. Or the bra burners of the 1970s, who eschewed undergarments to symbolize political and social freedom. The recommendation that U.S. military personnel do without in order to reduce the occurrence of (pardon the French) crotch rot, is widely reported—thus the origin of the term “going commando.”
Underwear propagandists claim the garments provide enhanced comfort, warmth, and hygiene, but who are they kidding? With today's increased standards of personal hygiene and comfortable, rip-stop fabrics, underwear serves as only a mild aphrodisiac an
d as a first line of defense for the mildly incontinent. (Note: though American pop singers, and anyone else for that matter, should be aware of the line between discreetly going commando and outright exhibitionism; this line, of course, is based on skirt length and the likelihood of being photographed while stepping out of a chauffeured car.)
For those interested in taking the first step toward a less inhibited lifestyle, check out the Aussie jeans aptly known as freeballers. They include built-in boxers and a button fly.
U.S. military's recommendation for the strategic removal of undergarments was taken a step further by the Liberian warlord Joshua Blahyi, known to friend and foe as General Butt Naked for his habit of leading naked troops into battle while wearing nothing but boots.
HOT WHEELS CARS RELEASED IN 1968 AND 1969
Look through your childhood closet. Does your old, hot-pink Hot Wheels Beach Bomb have surfboards strapped to the sides, or do they stick out the back window? If they stick out the back window, you will not be able to launch it down your Supercharger Sprint Track, but your disappointment might be slightly tempered by the $70,000 you may be able to get for the defective car at auction (as paid by Bruce Pascal in 2000). In general, scan your closet for any early Hot Wheels in pink, which was considered a girly color and used sparingly—making it the rarest and thus the most valuable color.
