House of Straw
Use six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by moving only three straws. Try it! To all but the most creatively freethinking, this is impossible. The trick is to go 3D—pick up the three straws that make the bottom and sides of the rectangle and replace them so that one end of each straw is rooted in a corner of the triangle with all three moved straws touching above the center of the original triangle, like a tent or teepee—four, equal triangles, each the size of the original roof.

Paper Match

True Math Genius
This trick will bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened math geek. First, lay matches on a table to form the equation I + II + III = IIII (crossed matches make the plus signs and parallel matches make the equals sign). Challenge your opponent to make this statement true by moving only one match and without messing with the sum after the equals sign. The trick is to pick up one match from the II, and lay it across the middle match in the III, making the full equation read:
I + I + I + I =IIII.

Two Glasses II

Newton’s apple fell from the tree and after thumping the scientist on the head, fell benignly to the ground. If the same apple fell toward Einstein (and happened to have a little added atomic oomph), it could, according to special relativity, become infinitely massive, flattening not only the unfortunate Einstein as he sat bodhisattva-like beneath the tree, but also the Earth itself.

This doesn’t mean Newton was wrong—only, that his theories apply more accurately to things traveling at speeds that don’t approach the speed of light (from slow-moving atomic particles to city transit busses). The crucial postulate of Einstein’s theory is the idea that the speed of light is measured to be exactly the same no matter the motion of the observer.

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.

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to
geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until
Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week
there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People.
Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST,
then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday
morning.

Here are the answers to last week's geek off:
1. Geek Culture/Ephemera
Blackbeard: 4, C, d
Black Bart: 2, B, b
Mary Read: 4, D, a
Jean Lafitte: 1, A, c

Caution: No redeeming scientific value. That said, this post might save your life. It will certainly enrich it.

On March 30, 1999, the hunky Italian supermodel was hit in the face by a goose while riding the Apollo’s Chariot roller coaster in Busch Gardens, Williamsburg, VA. Fabio was rushed to the emergency room at Williamsburg Community Hospital and later claimed his survival was “a miracle.” It took one stitch to close the cut on his nose. The goose was killed. You can still find the video online.

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.).

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People. Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST, then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday
morning.

Here are the answers to last week's geek off:
1. Geek Culture/Ephemera

Faces: Hulk Hogan, Junkyard Dog, Captain Lou Albano, Wendi Richter, Superfly Jimmy Snuka, Hillbilly Jim

The premise behind the pokerbot is simple: there are many, many bad players in online, low-limit poker games, and thus by playing a tight, mistake-free strategy, you will win over time. Unfortunately, because the worst players are in low-limit games and because Joe from Topeka takes his allotted thirty seconds every time he’s confronted with a $0.05 raise, you might make a better hourly wage mowing lawns, flipping burgers, or participating in medical trials, even if you play multiple tables at once (see earlier blog "Internet Poker: By the Numbers").

Enter the pokerbot: instead of doing the drudgery of playing mechanical, low-limit poker yourself, why not use a program to do it for you—better yet, use many programs each taking in a little money at a time.

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,

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People. Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST, then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday
morning.

Chicago O’Hare Incident

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.

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People. Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST, then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday morning.

Many parasites depend on their host’s behavior in order to successfully reproduce. Instead of leaving this behavior to chance, some parasites actively manipulate their hosts to produce the desired behavior. For example, after infecting a rat, the taxoplasmosa gondii parasite needs to be transferred to a cat’s belly to reproduce. To do this, the sneaky parasite rewires its rat host to actively seek the smell of cat urine. When the rat gets eaten, the parasite completes its necessary transfer.

Cordyceps fungi infect insects and steer them to higher ground where, when the insect dies and the fungus bursts forth, the fungus spores will be more effectively dispersed by wind.

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.

No matter what you read in the various published strategy guides and online chat rooms about pot odds, implied odds, reverse-implied odds and pot equity, there is no mathematically definite strategy for poker played in casinos. Because the best poker is unpredictable and in casinos you are likely to experience the best poker, all decisions are eventually somewhat intuitive. (Like the stock market, you can’t figure out Dan Harrington—if you could, you could beat him. Note: you can’t.)

Okay, my last blog was a list of Spam haikus. I offer this post as self-flagellation before the scientific community at large.

Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming contradiction of the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom (the more you measure, the more you disturb, until the thing no longer looks like what you started with). Without knowing the make-up of the original object, how could you replicate it across space?

The art of haiku poetry originated in Japan, with roots stretching back to the ninth-century or earlier. According to the US Census of 2000, people of pure Japanese descent make up 16.7% of the population of Hawaii. Residents of Hawaii annually consume nearly seven million cans of SPAM, or about six cans per capita.

If you do the math, it leads you inevitably to the work of Keola Beamer, the Hawaiian slack-key guitar player and leading advocate of SPAM haiku, who graciously contributed the following, deeply moving verses:

Silent, former pig
One communal awareness
Myriad pink bricks   

Twist, pull the sharp lid
Jerks and cuts me deeply but
Spam, aaah, my poultice

In mud you frolicked

To ring traditional church bells, a team of human operators pulls ropes that spin the giant bells (some in the multiple tons) and the mechanics of the system impose strict rules on what can be played. Gone entirely is melody, replaced by the idiomatically frenetic and somewhat cacophonous sound of cascading tones played for maximum note density.

Within the two seconds it takes a bell to rotate, the tones are slightly offset so that each rings before any bell sounds twice.