The Geek Alphabet: From “Away Team” to “Zork”

As a geek, you definitely know your ABCs, but do you know these? From A to Z, “away team” to “zork,” here is [GAS]’s take on the Geek Alphabet. Please note that all pictures featured below were licensed under a “CC” license. We’ve sourced them all at the bottom of this post.


























All images used for our geeky ABCs are from Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons licenses that allow for remixing. And they’re “share alike,” which means that you’re welcome to use our geeky alphabet – as long as you credit us and link back to this post!

A is for Away Team, where you should never wear red (mild mannered photographer)
B is for Binary, 1s and 0s in your head (jpstanley)
C is for Cosplay, making cons an awesome place (SoulCookie)
D is for Doctor, who keeps changing face (great beyond)
E is for Emoticons, that tell you what we’re feeling (neal gillis)
F is for Flickr, whose photos we are “stealing” (tricky)
G is for Gadgets, the way to our heart (slipstreamjc)
H is for Hardware, I took it apart! (jurvetson)
I is for iEverything, love it or hate it (dan dickinson)
J is for Japan, we’re glad Nintendo invaded (oscar mota)
K is for Keyboard, we love every letter (andrew*)
L is for Leias, the more the better! (koadmunkee)
M is for MMORPGs, it’s a magical place (i eated a cookie)
N is for NASA, and the beauty of space (nasa1fan)
O is for Occipital Lobe, we love using our brains (illuminaut)
P is for Programming, ((though lisp is a pain)) (phil_jackson)
Q is for Quilting, and other geeky crafts (athenamat)
R is for Reading, no matter what the path (timonoko)
S is for Science, though the cake is a lie (don solo)
T is for Tabletop, and a 20-sided die (nengard)
U is for Uncertainty, you just never know (neil crosby)
V is for Voltage, oh the places we’ll go! (oskay)
W is for the World Wide Web, it’s more than just porn (shimown)
X is for Xerox, where so much geekiness was born (marc smith)
Y is for Youth, since kids are geeks too (benmcleod)
Z is for Zork, watch out for the grue! (the_tml)



Heston Blumenthal: The Culinary Geek [Part 1]

Most lists of “why to date a geek” will make some reference to cookery. And when it comes to geekdom and cookery, Heston Blumenthal is the undisputed king.

What makes Blumenthal such a kitchen geek is that he recognizes that cooking is both an art and a science. Indeed, as Philip Harben, one of the first TV chefs, put it: “[Cooking] is the application of heat (or cold) to food in order to change its state; not merely to make hot (or cold) what before was cold (or hot), but to change its very form, color, texture, and flavor.”

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James Randi’s fiery takedown of psychic fraud

Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world’s psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I’ll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

If you could connect up to 5 devices at a time using just your mobile phone, how would that change how and when you access the internet?

I’ve become somewhat spoiled in recent years spending much of my time on college campuses where there’s wireless, well, everywhere – and it’s fast, too. Though come to think of it, that’s not that unusual anymore – it used to be that only coffee shops and bookstores had wireless access, but now you see it at a lot of random places like fast food restaurants and department stores. And even some places that used to charge ridiculous amounts for access (Borders and Starbucks come to mind!) have free wireless now.

My laptop is pretty much glued to my hip, along with my phone, and so if I could tether to my phone’s wifi that would actually be kind of awesome. Because whereas I can use my phone to do a lot, it certainly has its limitations. I actually had a situation recently where I got a phone call from work while I was driving asking if I could do something very quickly – and I said I could, as I’d be home in about half an hour. Of course then I got stuck in insane traffic and watched that half hour squeeze its way into a whole hour. If I could have pulled over into the nearest parking lot and been able to get online on my laptop, I probably would have. Honestly, this is probably one of the main reasons I would consider switching to a phone that allows tethering.

And of course we all have so many different wifi-enabled devices now that being able to connect more than one to our phone would be pretty handy – not just for the purpose of Internet access, but to share among devices. You could even connect your phone to your gaming console.

So do you think that being able to connect basically whatever you wanted to your phone would change things? If you could connect up to 5 devices at a time using just your mobile phone, how would that change how and when you access the Internet?

A Black Market for IP Addresses?

The internet could run out of addresses as early as next year — and there are warnings that a “black market” could develop further.

The problem isn’t with domain names, which can be expanded simply by creating news suffixes, but rather with IP addresses. Those are the numbers which, to put things very simply, identify individual machines connected to the Internet.

Since the current addressing system (IPv4) use 32-bit addresses, this limits the address space to a maximum of 4,294,967,296 addresses. That’s well below the world’s population, and of course many people don’t have an internet connection, but when you throw in multiple machines, home and office connections, and other networks, you can see how that system — which once would have seemed as good as infinite — could be exhausted.

The numbers are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (the IP address department of the better known ICANN), and it’s just released two of the final batches. With just 7% of numbers left to go, it predicts the last batch will be released for use next September, and will be used up by April 2012.

The long-term plan is replacing the existing system, IPv4, with the new IPv6, which uses 128-bit addresses, for a maximum of 3.4×1038 addresses. It’s been said (albeit as an unsourced Wikipedia entry) is enough that every person on earth could have the same number of different IP addresses as the number of atoms in a metric ton of carbon.

The drawback is that it’s not exactly practical to change every IP address in the world overnight. Instead, the two systems can be used side by side, but the process of smoothing the differences between the two systems can cause delays: not a major problem for an individual making a single connection, but a potential headache when repeated for every connection to a network.

Meanwhile there’s talk that the falling supply could create a “black market” in which addresses are sold unofficially at prices well above the official fee of $1,250 a year for 256 addresses. In the past, such sales have not technically been allowed, but administrators lately introduced a rule saying domains could be returned with instructions to issue them to another party: any money that changes hands is solely between the buyer and seller.

[Picture Source: Geek and Poke]