Quiz Night: Napoleon Dynamite, Urkel or Bill Gates?

Can’t tell the difference?  Ok, try this joke: 

(wording borrowed from www.everything2.com, though there are innumerable variations) 

The Flood is over and the ark has landed. Noah lets all the animals out and says, “Go forth and multiply.”

A few months later, Noah decides to take a stroll and see how the animals are doing. Everywhere he looks he finds baby animals. Everyone is doing fine except for one pair of little snakes. “What’s the problem?” askes Noah.
“Cut down some trees and let us live there”, say the snakes.

Noah does as they say. Several weeks later, Noah checks on the snakes again. Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy. Noah asks, “Want to tell me how the trees helped?”

“Certainly”, say the snakes. “We’re adders, so we need logs to multiply.”

Get it?  You remember your logarithms, right?

Now you’re ready for this Thursday’s Robotic Librarian challenge.  Don’t be scared, I actually know two people who took this and turned out to be blissfully, boringly normal.  But let’s be honest, the fact that you’re reading this (or any) blog must mean that you are either a nerd, dork or geek. 

Now, be patient, because the quiz is actually quite long –but then you don’t want to sacrifice quality for any easy answers. right?

Good luck!

“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.”  (Niels Bohr)

Quiz Night: The Net Nostalgia Quiz

So this post marks the beginning of Phase 2 for Robotic Librarian. No, this has nothing to do with Starbucks’ plan to assume world domination. Instead, I plan on completely embracing my blog by imposing some order in my universe.

My goal is to continue using this as a forum both professional and personal, hopefully finding a balance between the two. Since starting Robotic Librarian I have begun to really look at the Internet with a critical eye. Prior to my first e-mail account in 1992 I was already using BBS and FTP protocols, so I’m not exactly a stranger to electronic environments. What I am coming to learn, then, is the real value of communicating through the net, and the enticing networking possibilities.

Back when I lived in Massachusetts, after undergrad, I had sworn off the net for a while. A house mate of mine, a die hard programmer with a serious Mountain Dew addiction, would program well into the night, every night, until he’d balance his mattress against the wall and fling himself into it. Repeatedly. He could program in HTML, CSS, Perl, Javascript, Lisp, C++ and numerous other platforms, and whatever jealously I felt was tempered by his, shall we say, gently sociopathic habits. I liked him, but he intimidated me at times. The man rented a powerful computer on the west coast, at a rate much higher than four of us paid toward the house we rented, that lived behind a glass case and was guarded by a 24-hour armed security service. I mean, a serious programmer.

He had a strong social conscience, though, and even though he worked quite profitably for numerous shadowy venture capitalists from around the country, he taught me a valuable lesson about the Internet’s capabilities. His first web project for himself, which you can still visit today, was protest.net, a website dedicated to user-generated information from around the globe for protesters to network with other social activists. It contains calendars of upcoming events, graphics, commentary and up to the minute usable information. Quite a feat, significant enough that within days of his uploading it he started to get phone calls from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Matt Drudge, Wired and several other smaller news venues. Powerful. (But not updated anymore, I just discovered…)

So, here I am with a blog, trying to understand the value of social networking, as well as responsive, responsible librarianship, and I think we are onto something. In that spirit, please check back to see what changes and programming I will be experimenting with on my way toward bringing something substantial to the table, for your consideration.

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But the web is also criminally fun, and my first bit of organized programming will be to post either a quiz or a survey every Thursday from here on out. Just check for posts that begin with “Quiz Night.” Today’s quiz will be a nostalgic look back at the world wide web, circa 1992 or so. The Net Nostalgia Quiz randomly loads five questions for you from a user supplied pool of questions each time you take it. Get four right, and you get to supply your own question. It’s not as easy as it might seem…I hope you enjoy. And please, if anyone has suggestions for future surveys or quizzes let me know. They don’t have to be serious, net-related or even library related. The net is our oyster, after all.

Cheers!