The Glade 4.0

What geeks you out?

I stumbled upon the German Tank Problem the other day and had a geekgasm. I'd never heard of it before which is surprising since it has numerous geek subjects for me: military history (tanks!), statistics, and cryptography. Some of you will like it.

I got a Dremel for Christmas and spent hours browsing the internet for all the neat-o attachments I could buy for it. I bought diamond-crusted cut-off wheels just because I thought it would be cool to have diamond-crusted tools. (They were cheap and worthless but they were diamond-crusted!)

The problem with German tanks is that their poncy commander keeps passing his command rolls and keeps them hull down behind the wall.
Ok they aren't actually hull down in that picture, but we had 2 34s and two 70s when we started. That last one exploded shortly after the picture was taken.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Chicks in glasses geek me out.

_________________

Add a ponytail and +1!

Anything new and Electronic

I often find myself enthralled in the act of hacking my electronics, only to do nothing with them once hacked.

I generally geek out on anything Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. I'll go into great detail describing my criticisms usually. In my work life, any scientific misinformation or hot topic in science will get me to geek out and try to describe it to people who usually don't care enough to be hearing my ramblings, particularly my girlfriend.

Comic books

_________________
"None is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the
ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

Board games, card games, dice games

_________________
This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Weather

_________________

MTG

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

That, I hacked my HTC HD2 to replace Windows Mobile 6.5.5 with Android 2.3 just because I could, but it's my old phone on my old carrier so I really have nothing to do with it.

Aside from that Anime, Manga and also lately I've been enthralled by cosplaying, I've kind of done two so far and doing my first one based off an anime now for Anime Boston this year

Running and reaching that point when you arent tired or breathing hard anymore, best feeling in the world!

_________________


Dream as if you'll live forever...
...Live as if you'll die tomorrow

Vivere Senza Rimpianti

My wife asking where's your geek helmet (a headband LED light).


Chating with other computer/mmorpg/MTG/rpg/micro warefare gamers.

Watching/spectating/officiating any computer/mmorpg/MTG/rpg/micro warefare games.

Any movie/tv show with flashy fake/real martial arts stuff, spaceships, lasers, cool special effects and/or fight scenes.

Shoping any book/electronic/fng store.

_________________
Gorse

When that happens to me it means I'm dead.

I like science that results in unexpected results. Playing with a non-Newtonian fluid is bizarre. A few months ago I was fooling around with magnets and tried this copper pipe/magnet experiment and was totally surprised by its behavior. I sat in a chair and dropped a ball magnet through the same copper pipe for 45 minutes, fascinated by the results. I was acting the idiot savant, minus the savant.

Ditto. If I only had enough cash laying around to buy all of the obscure games at my FLGS. 50+ bucks a pop for a board game tends to add up quickly.

I've sat out of this thread for a bit to really consider what comes up in the intervening time. I'm borderline pretty mellow about everything, then get all pumped about a specific this or that until I overdo it and wind up relegating it back to something I don't spend much time with. So it was hard to pinpoint the things that fit the bill for this thread on a consistent basis. :p Decided on two things, though.

First off: scale. Applies in a lot of ways. Usually it's things like size of the solar system or speed of light or that ridiculous temperature that scientists generated in the LHC. There are occasionally these things that just can't really be properly conceptualized by the normal person and I always love to spend a bit trying to think about it or talking about it. This also shows up in more mundane ways, though made interesting by people not usually thinking about it: what was 'ancient' to someone that lived in 'ancient' times, how far away was 'far away' to them, etc.

The other thing is Google maps, specifically (more and more over the past few years) Google Street View. It's no substitute for actually going to those places, but I can always spend an hour here or an hour there going around almost anywhere urban. Tracking down some ramen places in Tokyo for my buddy who lives there. Going around Singapore seeing some nice parts of that city. Seeing the Eiffel tower from the point of view of an average visitor as opposed to postcardesque pictures. Really brings a lot of the things I've heard about or even seen on TV to a sort of reality, since TV, advertisements, etc always depict things in a certain way. Street View is just... pictures, and lets you see the places from a much more normal point of view than ever before. Even YouTube doesn't have this degree of authenticity.

It's probably a rare month that passes when I don't end up going around Google Street View to this city or that with my 10 year old niece. She has a pretty good grasp of where various places are located now, and a whole lot more to go on for these places than just what she saw in some TV show. It's good stuffs all around.

Opening .exe files in Audacity and seeing what they sound like.