Effort.
Like a lot of geeks of “my generation,” I am an avid reader of the website Slashdot. I have been a reader since its early days, and its tagline of “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” still resonates with me — even if I don’t always find the content relevant any more. However, it still does point me at interesting things from time to time. Slashdot hooked me onto XKCD, a geeky “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Reading XKCD is always fun, and usually interesting, as some of these posts make evident. Some things they post purely as a joke, but that take on a life of their own.
A while back on Slashdot, I caught a link that reminded me of one of the XKCD items that gained life. The general idea is that you take a trip to a location, derived from a computer-generated interpretation of the most recent opening price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Apparently, at one point, a modification of this algorithm produced a location that was near the South Pole. So, some geeks on the Internet with friends at the Scott-Amundsen Research Station at the South Pole arranged an expedition. Internet history was made.
Geeky things like this usually end up interesting me. Geocaching, something in a similar vein, has taken on a life of its own, and I occasionally participate in that. It’s come up with other things, like verifying USGS markers, visiting whole-integer points of latitude and longitude, and other such silliness. Some of these tasks are fairly cheap, lots of fun, and very family friendly. I wish I had more time (and, sometimes, more attention span) to do more of these.
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