Recently, I moved into a new office, and one of the facilities employees sent to secure my pictures to newly painted walls had trouble figuring out the math. In fact, we ended up putting his task in math-problem terms: If a wall is eight feet long and the book case takes up three feet, what is the center of the remaining area? And . . . you need to hang three paintings equal distances horizontally from each other in the center of that space. They are each 18 inches high. If the floor-to-ceiling measurement is eight feet and the lowest painting is three feet off the ground, where do you drive the nail for each horizontal painting?
After he pounded in the nails, the “facilities guy” found that the top two pieces had less of a gap between them than the bottom two. His good-natured response before yanking out the nails? “Hey, I was a lit major, not a math major!”
That little episode got me thinking about the Olympics. You know what those are, right? I mean…my geek friends are either really into #Rio2016 or they couldn’t care less. I’m in the former category.
So, if you’re like me, you’ve loved watching Michael Phelps put a trash-talker in his place, gasping as Mo Farah wins gold after falling during his 10Km race, and seeing why a lot of new parents will be naming their daughters “Simone.”
Because I’m going for gold in the Olympic TV-watching event, I wonder… What do you think would make awesome geek Olympics? I think I would pay to see a room full of people racing to hang art.
What Would You Like to See in the Geek Olympics?
How much would we need to draw on the “ancient” to inform the present? Qualifying events like technical precision with a joystick and playing Myst or Pac-Man on a Pentium computer? Best origami version of the Millennium Falcon? Closest reproduction of the Enterprise interior using Legos? Most thorough knowledge of Marvel characters? Moving into the finals, we’d definitely need something in the Pokemon category.
What do you think? What would you pay to see?
