Category: Geek Trivia

On August 31, 2001, your friendly neighborhood Trivia Geek, Jay Garmon (me), was handed the keys to a so-called TechMail known as Geek Trivia. That first column was barely 200 words long, was sourced from Snopes.com, and involved some inside-baseball production trivia about The Simpsons. During the course of the next seven years, the column would grow to more than 80,000 subscribers in more than 200 countries, would twice dodge the cancellation axe, and would become the lynchpin of this, the Geekend blog.

And this is the last Geek Trivia I’ll ever write for TechRepublic or the Geekend. The Trivia Geek is hanging up his spurs after seven and a half years of slinging interrogative minutia across the World Wide Web. The editorial authorities here at TechRepublic have paid me the ultimate compliment by dubbing me irreplaceable; Geek Trivia won’t go on without me, so this is the final entry for the newsletter and the column under this humble masthead.

Before we close shop, however, there is one last trivia question I’d like to put to the audience; one that I hope will be worth the seven years or so of work and research it took to conjure.

WHAT ARE THE TRIVIA GEEK’S 20 FAVORITE GEEK TRIVIA COLUMNS OF ALL TIME?

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Good news, tragically single geeksters: The next time you manage to get a phone number from a romantic prospect that begins with the dialing prefix 555, it’s possible that the target of your affections isn’t giving you a pop-culture-inspired brush-off. Possible, but not likely. That’s because, contrary to what conventional wisdom and years of movie- and television-consumption may have taught you, not every U.S. telephone number beginning with 555 is fake. Just lots of them.

The North American Numbering Plan — which has been the governing document for assigning and maintaining telephone numbers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and various nearby countries since 1947 — was amended in 1994 to formally reserve exactly 100 telephone numbers for fictional use. That is to say, any telephone number falling between 555-0100 and 555-0199 would never be placed in service, and instead be reserved for use in movies, television, and other mass media works of fiction. Thus, if someone you chat up hands you a 555 phone number outside that range, they may not be scamming you. That said, most active 555 numbers are used by businesses or service lines, so odds are you are still being duped, but it’s not a dead certainty.

The need for “fiction-safe” phone numbers is fairly straightforward; if a phone number becomes an element of pop culture, a certain percentage of fans will be unable to resist dialing it to see who answers, creating a nuisance for whichever poor sap happens to share a number with a fictional character or organization. Tommy Tutone’s famous “867-5309/Jenny” pop song has been the classic example of this phenomenon.

In fact, fiction-safe phone numbers predate the 555 rule. Until the early 1970s, AT&T kept a list of inactive but potentially “real” phone numbers that it shared with Hollywood, but by 1973, every possible seven-digit phone number was in use somewhere in the United States. Thus, from 1973 on, the 555 exchange became Ma Bell’s recommended fake phone prefix. In 1994, further demand for additional phone numbers forced the reserved list down to just 100 phone numbers under the 555 exchange.

Still, one quasi-fictional 555 telephone number from outside the 0100 to 0199 range remains a prominent fixture in Hollywood productions, as it has some traditional significance that predates the existence of not only fake 555 numbers, but 10-digit phone numbers altogether.

WHAT POTENTIALLY REAL 555 TELEPHONE NUMBER DOES HOLLYWOOD CONTINUE TO USE IN MOVIES AND TV SHOWS, AND WHY?

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On some level, you kind of have to hate Isaac Asimov because he was one of those guys who were so talented and intelligent that even their mistakes became accidental successes. Case in point: Asimov’s “practice article” for his doctoral dissertation in biochemistry, which has since become a legend in both scientific and science fictional circles.

Asimov, you see, started selling science fiction at the tender age of 19 and continued to do so for the rest of his life. Early on, however, Asimov’s fiction talent was strictly a sideline. He had serious academic pursuits, not the least of which was earning a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University, which he did in 1948 at the age of 28. As a credit to his modesty, Asimov feared that his years of writing sci-fi had robbed him of the ability to write dry, formal, academic prose, so he wrote a spoof scientific article for practice.

The spoof involved research into thiotimoline, a substance so soluble that it actually dissolved into water a second before coming into contact with H₂O. This implied thiotimoline actually had nascent time-travel properties that could be chemically exploited. Not exactly the kind of topic one expects to be taken seriously.

Naturally, Asimov’s goof article was still good enough for publication, and he successfully sold it to the legendary John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov asked that the spoof be published under a pseudonym so that, in the unlikely event that they might find the article, his PhD examiners wouldn’t hold his mocking of academia against him. To Asimov’s dismay, the article — “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” — appeared under his own, true byline.

To no one’s surprise, not only did Asimov’s instructors discover the spoof article, they were amused by it and actually asked Asimov a faux question about thiotimoline as the final query of his thesis defense. Asimov earned his PhD and then went on to a successful writing career that spanned a wide array of fiction and nonfiction, including three famous follow-up articles about thiotimoline.

And if you think that’s an insane capacity for turning minor effort into major success, wait until you hear about the other fictional substance that became the basis of an Asimov novel – one that the late author wrote on a lark to “correct” another sci-fi scribe’s technical mistake.

WHAT NOVEL DID ISAAC ASIMOV WRITE AS A “CORRECTION” TO ANOTHER SCI-FI AUTHOR’S SCIENTIFIC MISTAKE?

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For those of you wondering where I get my inspiration for Geek Trivia, this Lore Brand Comic isn’t far off from my process. There’s a reason I put the artist in my 50 Twitter ubergeeks list.

Geeks love jokes that require some level of smarts to appreciate, which is probably why April Fool’s Day pranks are so big with the techie set. For example, the Internet Engineering Task Force releases a faux-RFC on the first of every April, once even asking for feedback on a protocol for omniscience, and BMW annually touts a humorously fictional technical innovation for its luxury cars, like insect deflector shields. And then there’s Google.

Our benevolent search engine overlords have made a habit of producing headline-grabbing product announcements every April 1^st. It all started in 2000, when Google revealed the MentalPlex, a new search engine technology that finally solved the long-running inconvenience of having to actually type a search query by instead simply reading the user’s mind.

The April Fool’s shenanigans resumed in 2002 when Google mocked the budding ranks of search engine optimizers screeching that they didn’t know how PageRank worked (and thus couldn’t game the system). The answer? PigeonRank, a search hierarchy run by humanely treated trained pigeons. (Scam that system, black hatters.)

Then, in 2004, Google mocked its own reputation as an almost science-fictionally geek-friendly workplace when it started “hiring” for positions at its new branch office — on the surface of the moon! The Google Copernicus Center grabbed serious online buzz, and Google has maintained the tradition of annual April Fool’s announcements every year since:

• Google Gulp (2005) - An energy drink that supposedly boosted drinkers’ intelligence, allowing them to use Google more efficiently.
• Google Romance (2006) - An online dating service powered by Google’s search algorithm, offering “contextual dates.”
• Google TiSP (2007) - A Toilet Internet Service Provider that mocked Internet-via-power-line services by promising broadband ‘net access via your sewer line.
• AdSense for Conversations (2008) - One of about a dozen hoaxes in ‘08, this product offered to serve contextual ads — via a large LCD whiteboard hat — based on what you say out loud to other human beings.

While these April Fool’s traditions garner Google loads of positive publicity and enhance the brand as a fun place to work, they have upon occasion backfired. In one rather notorious instance, Google announced a real product on April 1^st, one so apparently too-good-to-be-true that observers initially assumed it was an April Fool’s prank.

WHAT REAL — AND HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL — GOOGLE PRODUCT WAS ASSUMED TO BE AN APRIL FOOL’S HOAX WHEN FIRST RELEASED?

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If you uncover a questionable fact or debatable aspect of this week’s Geek Trivia, just post it in the discussion area of the article. Every week, yours truly will choose the best quibble from our assembled masses and discuss it in a future edition of Geek Trivia.

This week’s quibble comes from the March 24, 2009 edition of Geek Trivia, ”Pros and (emoti)cons.” TechRepublic member sidekick informed me that various parties’ attempt to copyright, trademark, and charge royalties for various emoticons was the least of my online-text worries:

“I just secured the copyrights to the alphabet, and a few non-alphanumeric ASCII characters, such as carriage return and line feed. I’ll let this article go, Jay, but next time get your checkbook out first. Hmm, this should look good on my resume to Microsoft.”

Duly noted, sidekick. I await your future licenses fees with…well…let’s call it anticipation and leave it at that. ;)

Thanks for the quibble, and keep them coming.

Falling behind on your weekly Geek fix?

Check out the Geek Trivia Archive, and catch up on the most recent editions of Geek Trivia.

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Theoretically, if you’ve ever typed a colon or semicolon in sequence with a parenthesis with the intent of indicating the emotional tone of a written statement, then you just might owe somebody a royalty fee. Contrary to all conventional wisdom, the use of certain emoticons — which is the term of art for those little smileys and frownies composed of punctuation marks — is trademarked in certain contexts. Seriously.

Despair, Inc., creator of the infamous Demotivator posters, owns the U.S. frownie copyright — but only on printed materials. A Russian entrepreneur, Oleg Teterin, claims rights to various smileys and frownies but promises not to enforce them on end users — just on deep-pocket tech outfits. And in Finland, where many a text-friendly mobile phone is made, almost as many emoticon expressions are protected under trademark law.

The secret to trademark and copyright enforcement is context. As mentioned, Despair, Inc. only locked up a particular frownie — :-( — in a few types of print media. Other emoticon claims revolve around the conversion of punctuation strings into animated images, as happens in instant message applications. Nobody could reasonably apply for, obtain, or enforce a blanket right to all emoticons everywhere. Moreover, trying to prevent people from typing out an emoticon without first paying a license fee is unlikely to get much legal backing, though common sense has little to do with it. You can thank the legal intellectual property concept of prior art.

The documented use of emoticons goes back more than a quarter century — and is older than the word emoticon itself. More to the point, the use of punctuation-based symbols to denote tone (especially sarcasm) is older still. No less a literary authority than Vladimir Nabokov told The New York Times in 1969 that, “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.” The ARPAnet was just getting the hang of packet-switching at that point, so it’s safe to say the idea of an emoticon predates the Internet.

By 1982, Internet-based communication was common enough that its regular users had recognized the need for something akin to the “supine round bracket” that Nabokov proposed — and somebody said so. While many users probably independently solved the problem, one man gets credit for launching the emoticon concept — if not the word — into the online lexicon.

WHO IS CREDITED WITH INTRODUCING THE SMILEY EMOTICON TO THE INTERNET?

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As Geek Trivia readers well know, trademarks are funny things, giving rise to all manner of odd behavior, and nowhere is this moreso than in the entertainment industry. Via product placement, advertisers pay top dollar for fictional characters to be seen or heard using their real-world products or services — so long as those brands are portrayed in a reasonably favorable manner. If TV or movie producers aren’t intent on painting these brands in a shiny, happy light, filmmakers often have to make up their own fictional products and companies — unless they snag one from the unofficial fictional brand vault.

That’s right, there is something of an open-source pool of brands and trademarks that have made their way into various productions over the years, filling in for companies that might not care for the treatment they’d receive in certain Hollywood plots. The prime example of this is Oceanic Airlines, which has of late been made famous by the genre-bending TV drama Lost. Oceanic was the operator of the airliner that crashed in the Lost pilot, trapping the show’s ensemble cast of castaways on a mysterious, destiny-warping island.

Understandably, no real-world airline would want to become associated with a wildly disastrous crash that either killed its passengers or trapped them in what may be a quasi-time-travel version of purgatory. What most Lost fans don’t realize is that Oceanic Airlines has been around Hollywood for far longer than Lost was a glimmer in J.J. Abrams’ eye, serving as the go-to fake airline for many a passenger jet reference or — quite often — a crash.

The first documented appearance of Oceanic was in an episode of Flipper in 1965 — though most modern non-Lost appearances come from stock footage licensed from the 1996 film Executive Decision. The latter shots crop up in several low-budget TV movies.

Heisler beer, Morley Cigarettes, and Gannon Car Rentals are other shared, unreal brands that have circulated around Tinseltown in unrelated projects. Of late, however, a new product type has emerged on the plot-device scene — the search engine. Even though Google is now a verb, the “Don’t be evil” folks look unkindly on characters using the search engine for nefarious — or at least unlicensed — purposes on-screen. Thankfully, the unofficial fictional brand vault has a budding Google substitute that TV shows can turn to.

WHAT FICTIONAL SEARCH ENGINE HAS BECOME AN UNOFFICIAL HOLLYWOOD SUBSTITUTE FOR GOOGLE ON TELEVISION?

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For all practical purposes, the age of industrial robotics began slightly less than 50 years ago, when the first Unimate robot took up its position on a General Motors assembly line in New Jersey in 1961. Though the Unimate design and patents had been created by George Devol a few years earlier, and the idea of a robot dates back to at least the first century AD, Unimate was the first industrial application of an artificial, automated laborer. As to whether that makes Unimate the first “real” robot depends greatly on your definition of robot — something almost no one agrees upon.

Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines a robot as thus:

1. A machine that looks like a human being and performs various complex acts (as walking or talking) of a human being ; also : a similar but fictional machine whose lack of capacity for human emotions is often emphasized

2. An efficient insensitive person who functions automatically

3. A device that automatically performs complicated often repetitive tasks

4. A mechanism guided by automatic controls

So, a robot may or may not be a machine, may or may not be humanoid, and may or may not be autonomous. Some combination of these attributes certainly describes Unimate, but some permutation of these descriptors also applies to Dwight from The Office. Perhaps ironically, the first widely popular depiction of creatures called robots was actually something akin to a cross between a Unimate and Dwight Schrute.

In 1921, Czech playwright Karel Capek opened a play called “R.U.R.,” which depicted the plight of artificial, though biological, laborers created by a company called Rossum’s Universal Robots. The term robot in the play was derived from the Czech word robotnik, for slave, and it popularized the term for an autonomous, manufactured worker.

That said, Karel Capek didn’t coin the term robot — his brother Josef did. It was just that Karel was successful at promoting robot into the public consciousness. Over the course of the 20^th century, robot came to be synonymous with the various mechanical — and later electronic — automata that had been dreamt up and described by visionaries since the days of Heron of Alexandria. Still, it would take an iconic science fiction writer to (accidentally) coin the term for the field of study that surrounds these artificial laborers.

WHAT ICONIC SCI-FI WRITER ACCIDENTALLY COINED THE TERM “ROBOTICS?”

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If you uncover a questionable fact or debatable aspect of this week’s Geek Trivia, just post it in the discussion area of the article. Every week, yours truly will choose the best quibble from our assembled masses and discuss it in a future edition of Geek Trivia.

This week’s quibble comes from the Feb. 24, 2009 edition of Geek Trivia, “The (un)man with the plan.” TechRepublic member cjc5447 disputed the level of autonomy held by a certain groundbreaking unmanned aerial vehicle:

“The RQ-4 is the first unmanned aircraft to be granted permission to fly in Positive Control Airspace (PCA) over the United States by the FAA, but this aircraft does not file its own flight plans, and it is not completely autonomous. There are rated pilots at a ground station (at Beale AFB, CA or Edwards AFB, CA) who file a flight plan and control the aircraft from engine start to shutdown for each mission. Of course the aircraft is on autopilot most of the time, but a pilot still controls it remotely. The PCA ends at 60,000 ft altitude though, so above that (if you can get up that high) you can do whatever you want.”

This is perhaps a more cogent description of the RQ-4’s credentials; it’s the first aircraft allowed to fly in U.S. commercial airspace without a human either onboard or actively at the controls. It can be autopiloted the whole time — from takeoff to landing — and the FAA trusts the system enough to let it share the same chunk of sky that passenger airliners use, if only because an Air Force pilot is on standby to take over by remote control. Nonetheless, it’s still one step closer to a flying Terminator. Thanks for the quibble, and keep them coming!

Falling behind on your weekly Geek fix?

Check out the Geek Trivia Archive, and catch up on the most recent editions of Geek Trivia.

Test your command of useless knowledge by subscribing to TechRepublic’s Geek Trivia newsletter. Automatically sign up today!