Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!

But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then, deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free Geeks’ Guide to World Domination. So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.

Email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com. DON'T COMMENT YOUR ANSWERS or you will allow slackers to water down the winner’s pool, thus decreasing your chances of receiving said geek schwag (and you’ll get moderated, deserve a spanking, be summarily executed, etc.). You have until Friday at midnight EST. Then I'll post the answers—likely wrong ones—and we can fight about them.

Then try again next week. There’s a free book for each week’s winner, into perpetuity or until the powers-that-be at Three Rivers Press cut off my supply of free books.

To The Geek-Off Already!

1. GEEK CULTURE/EPHEMERA
Match the following quotes to their speakers:
 1) Mulder 2) Bill Murray 3) Skeletor 4) David Carradine 5) the Dalai Lama 6) Yoda
7) Linus Torvalds 8) Mr. Miyagi
    A. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
    B. To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance.
    C. Sometimes the only sane answer to an insane world is insanity.
    D. Which mindset is right? Mine, of course.
    E. Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort?
    F. Tell me about the loneliness of good…is it equal to the loneliness of evil?
    G. The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.
    H. No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher. Teacher say, student do.

2. CLASSIC PUZZLE
The boys in this class were asked to say their names and were
photographed just as they started to pronounce the first letters. Their
names are Oom, Alden, Eastman, Alfred, Arthur, Luke, Fletcher, Matthew,
Theodore, Richard, Shermer and Hisswald. Match the names to the correct
boys. List the correct names in order, starting in the back-left corner
and continuing across and then down to the start of the next row, as if
reading lines of text.

Figure 75.jpg















3. MATH/SCIENCE
Newton posited that matter is neither created nor destroyed. While any
gamer with a mage capable of casting Meteor Swarm or Magic Missile
knows this to be untrue, still teachers of Chemistry 101 hold to
Newton’s idea when forcing on high-school and undergraduate students
their narrow-minded approach to balancing chemical equations. Add
coefficients to these equations to make equal numbers of each type of
molecule on both sides of the equation (if you need more instructions,
then, well, you might need to do a little geek background work). And no
fractions, you slacker!

1. H2 + N2 → NH3   
2. NH3 + O2 → NO + H2O
3. NaCl + BeF2 → NaF + BeCl2   
4. FeCl3 + Be3(PO4)2 → BeCl2 + FePO4
5. Ca(OH)2 + H3PO4 → Ca3(PO4)2 + H2O   
6. C2H6 +O2 → CO2 + H2O

4. TECH
List at least three phrases you can spell by typing numbers on a basic calculator and then turning it upside down. Style counts.