Now there’s a neat idea   Leave a comment

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.

 

Posted March 3, 2013 by mec in Uncategorized

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