by Garth Sundem
Still, just because it's old doesn't necessarily mean it's priceless. Most of the cars on the list are worth between $100 and $500.
VALUE-BASED FANTASY FOOTBALL: DEFT, NOT DAFT, IN THE DRAFT
Fantasy football is a rare nexus of geek and meathead cultures. Enticingly, it is a nexus we geeks should rightly dominate, providing at least cursory psychological payback for games of flag football played in middle-school PE class. If only there were a way to snap a towel through fiber-optic lines (see quotes widely misattributed to Bill Gates, pages 172–173.
As any fantasy football website makes immediately clear, the most important time in your fantasy season is draft day. And, as you can easily find at these same sites, there are myriad strategies for drafting a winning team (most notably, build your team around a stud running back, though some debate this theory). However, below these rather obvious surface suggestions lurk the strategies we geeks can and should use to dominate the virtual sports world:
1. Before draft day, rank players by desirability, and then box your list into tiers. It may not be worth taking the first running back of the second tier if others who are generally comparable may remain in later rounds; instead, look to pick the last remaining player in a higher tier (maybe a QB or WR). Another way to say this is to pick the player who offers the largest projected point differential over remaining players. This is value-based drafting in a nutshell.
2. If you think a star player's stats are due to overall team quality, consider drafting a backup player on that team in later rounds. For example, any WR catching Brady in 2007 would have put up numbers, especially without Randy Moss pocketing anything airborne.
3. Look for indicators of breakout or breakdown years. For example, a contract year can provide just the motivation a player needs to put up some stats. For whatever reason the third season seems to offer breakout potential for wide receivers. And beware the curse of the thirty-year-old running back, which can immediately doom your fantasy season (see the Shaun Alexander debacle of 2007; ah, the heartbreak of the Seattle sports fan!—always a bridesmaid, never a bride!).
4. Fantasy owners will generally fill their starting rosters before drafting backups. Use this to your advantage: If everyone else has already drafted a QB, you may be able to safely wait for another couple rounds before doing so yourself. Keep a position checklist of the opposing owners’ picks.
OH SHIT! IT'S THE SCIENCE FAIR!
It's Tuesday night. Who knew the science fair was on Wednesday? Actually, your child has known for months but neglected to mention it or, in fact, do anything whatsoever about it until tonight. You know that if he or she is laughed at, it will destroy any semblance of burgeoning academic confidence, leading to delinquency and eventually to work in the sex industry and/or as a freelance writer. Never fear. Choose from the projects below:
QUASIMODO: MASTER OF PERMUTATIVE GROUP THEORY
To ring traditional church bells, a team of human operators pulls ropes that spin the giant bells, some weighing several tons. The mechanics of the system impose strict rules on what can be played. Gone entirely is melody, replaced by the idiomatically frenetic and somewhat cacophonous sound of cascading tones played for maximum note density. Within the two seconds it takes a bell to rotate, the tones are slightly offset so that each bell rings before any one bell sounds twice.
So instead of playing melodies, church bells are rung in rows—patterns that describe the order of bells. The pattern of highest to lowest in a six-bell tower is described as 123456 and is known as rounds. Simply ringing rounds over and over would quickly get monotonous, but because the weight of human ringers can only slightly slow or accelerate the bells, it is possible to change a bell's ringing order by only one position from row to row. Following these rules, diagram 1 shows the row pattern known as plain hunt or original, in which the maximum of three bell “switches” is followed by two switches, taking twelve rows to return to rounds. There are many methods that allow starting and ending at rounds without repeating a pattern, including plain bob minor, shown in diagram 2. Since bell ringers are not permitted visual aides like this one, they instead memorize the path of the lines (as shown) that define the place of their bell in each pattern.
In a full peal, every permutation is rung without repeating a row (starting and ending at rounds). Thus, at two seconds per row, it takes about half an hour to play a full peal in a six-bell tower (720 permutations). To play this same full peal on eight bells would take just over 22 hours (40,320 permutations).
IM AT YOUR OWN RISK
First there was BlackBerry thumb, and now iPod finger. This, according to the American Society of Hand Therapists, which coined both terms (in a major marketing coup for their member therapists). But before you dismiss these and other technogenic repetitive strain injuries as figments of future class-action hopefuls’ imaginations, consider OSHA'S estimate that RSIs affect hundreds of thousands of workers and cost the U.S. economy more than $20 billion a year in worker's compensation claims. Good old carpal tunnel syndrome affects almost eight million Americans. According to the ASHT, you can take the following steps to minimize your risk: Use a straight-wrist grip, take a break every hour (as if …), raise the device to eye level to avoid neck strain, get a good chair, and switch hands frequently.
If the aforementioned steps aren't realistic, avoid using any device that requires a power source.
GREAT MOMENTS IN CITIZEN JOURNALISM
The population density of Earth is 112 per square mile and rising. In 2007, nearly 3.3 billion people subscribed to cell phone service. This means that wherever and whenever news happens, someone is likely to see it and that someone within this viewing population will think, “Wow, instead of finding higher ground, I think I'll stand here and shoot pictures of this rapidly approaching giant wave.” Until recently, these shots of death and destruction would have made America's Funniest Home Videos (especially if said shots involved testicular damage); now, they're news. Below is a list of the top scoops made by everyday Joes and Janes:
• Rodney King beating: user-generated content before user-generated content was cool. George Holliday videotaped King's 1992 beating by four white police officers, resulting in massive backlash against the apparently racist LAPD.
• 2004 tsunami: the aforementioned “big wave”—230,000 people were killed, but some survived to post images.
• Sheffield dust-up: in 2005, Keith Whamond whipped out his digital camera to capture Yankee Garry Sheffield's scuffle with an intoxicated fan in Fenway Park's right-field bleachers.
• Execution of Saddam Hussein: proving that nothing is private, video footage of Hussein's final drop appeared online shortly after his 2006 execution.
• Lotticide: in 2002, speaking of the 1948 presidential candidacy of the segregationist Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott said, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.” Bloggers put this directly between the eyes of every American computer-user. Result: TKO—bloggers 1, Lott 0.
• Rathergate: two months prior to the 2004 presidential elections, Dan Rather of the CBS News program 60 Minutes went public with documents that offered an excoriating picture of GW's service with the National Guard. Like gerbils on Agent Orange, bloggers took to the Web to question the documents’ authenticity. Result: TKO—bloggers 1, Rather 0.
• London bombings: though every major news source covered the 2005 London bombings, the most immediate photos came from cell-camera-wielding citizens trapped on the subway.
• Hurricane Katrina: Amid governmental disorganization, citizens led the online charge to publicize routes to safety and the location of aid resources, and later to reunite family members via online message boards.
• Virginia Tech shootings: Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student, captured the sounds of gunshots and screams in the background of his much-played cell-phone video.
&
nbsp; • The Iraq War: soldiers’ blogs provide the first inklings of trouble in “Mission Accomplished” paradise.
THE QUOTABLE BILL GATES
• There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
• Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
• There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
• Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
• It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.
• About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software…. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.
• Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
Note 1. Quotes widely misattrib-uted to Gates include the following:
• Tell you what—I'll buy your right arm for a million dollars. I give you a million bucks and I get to sever your arm right here.
• The day is coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
• Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows.
Note 2. The Gates Foundation gives around $1.5 billion every year to education and global health.
Note 3. Microsoft company checks in the name of this author can be sent via Three Rivers Press.
TELEPORTATION USING EINSTEIN- PODOLSKY- ROSEN (EPR) ENTANGLEMENT
Traditionally, the crux of tele-portation has been its seeming contradiction of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom (the more you measure, the more you disturb, until the thing no longer looks like what you started with). Without knowing the makeup of the original object, how could you replicate it across space?
The answer is spooky, or to be precise, spooky action at a distance. In a (vastly oversimplified) nutshell, this spooky action describes the ability of a particle to influence the state of another particle without these particles ever having any measurable interaction. In other words, particles separated by space know things about each other they should not. This has allowed the following procedure:
Particle A is scanned and thus changed, but the information gleaned is transferred spookily to a new particle B, which has had no contact with A. Based on the information it picks up, particle B becomes an exact replica of particle A (but since particle A was completely farked—not to be confused with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colom-bia—the procedure is technically teleportation and not replication). If you want to severely damage your frontal lobe, consider that this procedure actually requires the intercession of a third particle, C, which acts as an information carrier, but must visit particle B (the result) before visiting particle A (the model), and thus transmits its information backward in time.
Yes, this is very, very spooky. But, according to IBM researchers, the technique has been used in the lab to teleport photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins, and trapped ions. The application of EPR entanglement is also seen as a promising step toward a quantum computer or Internet.
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: ALTERNATE SYMBOLS
Believe it or not, it is possible to eventually become bored with standard RPS. Should you find the spark gone even when throwing the notoriously feisty scissors, consider spicing up your life with one of the following variations:
• Bear, Salmon, Mosquito
• Bear, Ninja, Cowboy
• Nuclear Bomb, Boot, Cockroach
• Microwave, Kitten, Tinfoil
• Village Chief, Tiger, Mother-In-Law
• Elephant, Person, Ant
A SAM LOYD PICTURE PUZZLE
As you can see, the chain in this box is broken into thirteen unjoined pieces. The task of this French blacksmith (and thus yours) is to mend this chain, linking it together in one unbroken loop, and then to replace the links into a box of the same dimensions shown.
mind-numbing funness, visit Dave Lovelace at www.umop. com, where you can learn to play multiple-weapon RPS, like the RPS-25 shown on page 174.
CARTOON WOMEN WHO HAPPEN TO BE VERY HOT
This list intentionally omits Disney characters (Ariel, Esmerelda, Belle, Mulan, Pocahontas, Cinderella, Jasmine, Jane, Jessica Rabbit, etc.), as well as anime characters, the latter of which are nearly impossible to search online without also finding porn. The list (whose members are callously referred to by some as CILFs) includes only characters whose hotness is ancillary to their function within their cartoons.
• Veronica: ah, the question that has plagued male geeks since Pep Comics #22—Betty or Veronica? As Betty is a bit brain dead (and panders to the meathead demographic with her stuffed bears and auto repairs), this list instead chooses Veronica—whose vindictive evil is somehow magnetic.
• Jem: yes, the show was initially a Hasbro marketing ploy, and yes, you could only watch it if you claimed to have lost Rock, Paper, Scissors to your little sister, but seriously—Showtime, Synergy!
• The Baroness: if you think this G.I. Joe dominatrix is hot, check out the lead in the 70s-era pulp spy novels of the same name.
• Britney and Quinn: these two tarts from the show Daria represent everything geeks despise—and secretly yearn for.
• The White Queen: aka Emma Frost, this villain-turned-heroine is pure sex in white lingerie and a shoo-in for this list.
• Smurfette: admittedly the inclusion of Smurfette in this list sullies otherwise pure childhood memories. Oh well.
• She-Ra: an easy inclusion (as would be Wonder Woman).
• Daphne: Internet wisdom claims that while Velma cannot compete with Daphne's obvious pulchritude, the bespectacled, mousy crime-solver is the series's true hottie. Jinkies! It's a tough call.
• Rogue: while Rogue merits only #4 on IGN Entertainment's list of top ten X-babes (behind Emma Frost, Jean Grey, and Psy-locke and just ahead of Storm), her utter unattainability—skin-to-skin contact can result in death-allows comic readers to amplify their longing by sharing in comic characters’ unrequited lust.
• Cheetara: This fleet-footed Thundercat makes our collective battlestaff grow.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ROCKETRY'S SAFETY CODE
While many promote model rocketry to pyromaniac geek middleschoolers as a positive alternative to setting structure fires, the National Association of Rocketry offers the following guidelines (and more!) that seem designed to restrict said pubescent geeks to the toy side of the toy/antiaircraft-missile spectrum.
2. I will use only certified, commercially made model rocket motors, and will not tamper with these motors or use them for any purpose except those recommended by the manufacturer.
7. If my model rocket weighs more than one pound at liftoff or has more than four ounces of propellant, I will check and comply with FAA regulations before flying.
8. I will not launch my rocket at targets, into clouds, or near airplanes, and will not put flammable or explosive payload in my rocket.
To learn more about model rocketry, consider subscribing to Sport Rocketry magazine or, if you are a middle-or high-school student, participating in the Team America Rocketry Challenge. (Yes, it is actually called Team America.)
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF ICONIC SPORTS TEAM NAMES
• The Brooklyn (now L.A.) Dodgers are so named after a pejorative applied by Manhattanites to Brooklyn residents. In the late nineteenth century, they implied their superiority by teasing their eastern cousins about the necessity to always be on the lookout for trolleys—thus “trolley dodgers,” later shortened to “dodgers.”
of the team names in United States mainstream sports can hold a candle to the following names drawn from the annals (as it were) of world soccer:
• FART: a Norwegian women's soccer team
• Deportiva Wanka: a Peruvian soccer team
