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The Geek Atlas
brothke writes "A recent search on Amazon for travel guides returned over 30,000 results. Most of these are standard travel guides to popular tourist destinations which advise the reader to go to the typical tourist sites. The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a radically different travel guide. Rather than recommending the usual trite destinations, which are often glorified souvenir stores, the book takes the reader to places that make science real and exciting, and hopefully those who exit such places are more knowledgeable than when they went in." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.
The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive
author
John Graham-Cumming
pages
542
publisher
O'Reilly Media
rating
10/10
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-0596523206
summary
A fascinating and enjoyable read
Irrespective of its travel content, The Geek Atlas is a unique and fascinating read for the information and overview of its wide range of topics. If there is a fault in the book, it is with its title. When people see Geek Atlas, they might think that this is a book that takes the reader to boring and obscure places, which is the exact opposite of its intent.
Author John Graham-Cumming writes that you won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here." Every place he recommends is meant to have real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest.
Each of the books 128 chapters is separated into 3 parts: a general introduction to the place with an emphasis on its scientific, mathematical or technological significance; a related technical subject covered in greater detail, and practical visiting information. So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
Graham-Cumming notes that a disappointing trend with science museums today is a tendency to emphasize the wow factor without really explaining the underlying science. He notes the following 3 attributes of such museums: a short name ending with an exclamation mark, a logo featuring pastel colors or a cuddle cartoon mascot, or an IMAX theater.
Why does the book specifically have 128 places listed? See chapter 58, for the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. Graham-Cumming notes that your average travel guide would have listed perhaps 100 or 125 places. 128 is a round binary number (10000000). Of course, those who are binary obsessed might wonder why this book is not titled 10000000 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.
The 128 places listed are for the most part divided equally between sites in Europe and the USA, with a few in the Far East and Russia. A complete listing of the sites is mapped on the books web site. Africa for some reason seems to be left out and perhaps a follow-up volume will fill that void. Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology. Nigeria for example is famous for its 419 advance-fee fraud, but not its overabundance of contributors to physics.
For the US locations, there are locations for 25 states, with California being the biggest with 7 suggested places to visit. With that, it is surprising that the book lists the HP Garage, given that it is not open to the public and only serves as a shack to be photographed. Other places such as the US Navy Submarine Force Museum and MIT Museum are indeed more visit worthy.
The tours of some of the sites, like the HP Garage will take less than an hour or so (chapter 42 — Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London, UK), while others one can spend a half or full-day at the site.
While The Geek Atlas is touted as a travel guide, it is much more than that. Its 128 chapters are a wide-ranging overview of science and mathematics. Topics run the gamut from physics and pharmacology to transistors and optics. In fact, the book would make a superb syllabus for an introduction to science course. The plethora of subject covered, combined with its easy to read and absorbing style makes it a fantastic book for both those that are scientifically challenged, yet curious, and those that have a keen interest in the sciences.
The Geek Atlas is a fascinating and enjoyable read; in fact, it I found it hard to put down. Lets hope the author is working on a sequel with the next 256 additional places where science and technology come alive.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Author John Graham-Cumming writes that you won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here." Every place he recommends is meant to have real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest.
Each of the books 128 chapters is separated into 3 parts: a general introduction to the place with an emphasis on its scientific, mathematical or technological significance; a related technical subject covered in greater detail, and practical visiting information. So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
Graham-Cumming notes that a disappointing trend with science museums today is a tendency to emphasize the wow factor without really explaining the underlying science. He notes the following 3 attributes of such museums: a short name ending with an exclamation mark, a logo featuring pastel colors or a cuddle cartoon mascot, or an IMAX theater.
Why does the book specifically have 128 places listed? See chapter 58, for the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. Graham-Cumming notes that your average travel guide would have listed perhaps 100 or 125 places. 128 is a round binary number (10000000). Of course, those who are binary obsessed might wonder why this book is not titled 10000000 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.
The 128 places listed are for the most part divided equally between sites in Europe and the USA, with a few in the Far East and Russia. A complete listing of the sites is mapped on the books web site. Africa for some reason seems to be left out and perhaps a follow-up volume will fill that void. Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology. Nigeria for example is famous for its 419 advance-fee fraud, but not its overabundance of contributors to physics.
For the US locations, there are locations for 25 states, with California being the biggest with 7 suggested places to visit. With that, it is surprising that the book lists the HP Garage, given that it is not open to the public and only serves as a shack to be photographed. Other places such as the US Navy Submarine Force Museum and MIT Museum are indeed more visit worthy.
The tours of some of the sites, like the HP Garage will take less than an hour or so (chapter 42 — Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London, UK), while others one can spend a half or full-day at the site.
While The Geek Atlas is touted as a travel guide, it is much more than that. Its 128 chapters are a wide-ranging overview of science and mathematics. Topics run the gamut from physics and pharmacology to transistors and optics. In fact, the book would make a superb syllabus for an introduction to science course. The plethora of subject covered, combined with its easy to read and absorbing style makes it a fantastic book for both those that are scientifically challenged, yet curious, and those that have a keen interest in the sciences.
The Geek Atlas is a fascinating and enjoyable read; in fact, it I found it hard to put down. Lets hope the author is working on a sequel with the next 256 additional places where science and technology come alive.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
should be titled "trips that you'll come back with the same number of condoms you left."
Offering 256 cool places to visit.
I hope the Stanford Linear Accelerator is in there, took a tour of that machine about two decades ago. Awesome place. The SPEAR experiment target machine alone was worth the price. 40 tons of delicate widgets and gizmos.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
As far as "travel" books for geeks go, I would recommend "Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape" by Brian Hayes.
The book is fantastic! Even the route you take to commute to work every day will suddenly become a sightseeing trip.
Highly recommended for geeks and others who still posses a spark of curiosity.
can be found in Samarqand.
Yours In Tourism,
K. Trout
For young and budding geeks, wired lists 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer. I guess they weren't obsessed with rounding up to a power of 2. Come to think of it, it's been a long time since I wrote code that worried about optimizing usage of memory/disk space to such numbers.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
How does a tourist get to experience real science getting done? I went to Los Alamos and went to a few museums there. I felt talked down to at best, and at worst propagandized. All this while many of the countries top minds are doing amazing research just thousands of feet away.
No, the only way to really see science is to have a personal connection with the investigators involved. Get a tour of their labs, sit in on a talk by a visiting professor, go to a poster session. I don't see how this book will help with any of that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A good fraction of my vacation trips are for educational reasons. I want to see places, museums. conventions where I can learn new things. Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
For example in April 2008 I went to central New Mexico to catch three main sites: the Trinity bomb site (open only two Saturdays a year because its inside a military base), the Socorro large radio telecope array (the staple of almost many scifi movies), and Roswell. Along the way I hit the Almogorov Space Museum (sadly declining), and the Albquerque Atomic and Ballooning museums. Los Alamos is also not far away.
My next goal is to catch one of the seven remaining shuttle launches. I better get organized because they end soon.
I always suspected he was doing Storm on the side.
If you happen to find yourself in the desert of Eastern WA, I can wholeheartedly recommend Richland's CREHST exhibition on the Hanford site, and the Western branch of the LIGO gravitational interferometer out on the Hanford reservation itself. It's not often you get to stand on a scientific instrument two miles across!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I've attended such at the Jet Propulsion Lab and the USGS. These tend to be more substantive than your generic tour.
Is there any chance that there's an explanation for the Fibonacci Sequence on the side of the dome of the Italian National Cinema Museum (Mole Antonelliana) in Torino? If there was an explanation in or on the building itself, I either didn't see it, or couldn't read it...
128 Places Where You Have Zero Chance of Getting Laid
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The majority of sites are museums, certainly Germany seemed to be mostly museums and only Peenemünde was a location although also a museum. No mention of the Nördlinger Ries crater or the crater a Steinheim - which you can visit nor any mention of Neandertal outside Dusseldorf or even Einstein's birthplace in Ulm to name but a tiny number of places you would expect to appear in this "list"
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
That's only 15km from my house! It's quite easy to reach!
Anyway, I notice a rather strong focus on English-speaking countries. Why only five sites in Germany? Why is the Boerhave Museum in Leiden (in the Netherlands) missing (with its fascinating exhibit of the first-ever helium liquification system)?
And why is the Atomium in Brussels there? Talk about a crummy museum...
I feel it would be more effective to write this guide on geek places at normal-people destinations, as some of us cannot gather interest at home to visit a museum about computers. On the other hand, if said museum were in the Carribean, most of us would have little problem convincing a signficant other.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
The typical CS smug counts from 0, giving 128 = 1111111. Nice 'round' binary number generally means it is the largest number that fits within a certain number of bits.
Hand in your geek card at the door.
Perhaps I am too much of a fan boy for my own country, but one Canadian site? And it's Baddeck?
Am I the only dinosaur-loving geek wondering why Drumheller isn't on the list?
The only paleontology-loving geek wondering at the omission of the Burgess Shale?
The only astronomy-loving geek wondering the exclusion of DRAO?
The only communications-loving geek perplexed at leaving out Signal Hill?
And these are only the ones right off the top of my head! Imagine what a little detailed research would uncover!
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
Kirk: Scotty, you're confined to quarters.
Scotty: Thatnks, Captain! It'll give me a chance to catch up on my technical journals!
Free Martian Whores!
What are the criteria used by the author to make the list? It seems to me that a lot of the sites are related just to modern developments in technology, a lot less connected with (not contemporary) sciences...
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology.
Ancient Egypt? Mathematics, astronomy, engineering? Definitely a significant contribution to the world of science.
Great, now all these destinations will be overrun with geeks.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
As a gadget/games nerd I am very excited about going to Akihabara in Tokyo in about 6 weeks. Apparently it's the Mecca for people like me. Even with the strong Yen (vs USD) I'm hoping to find some good deals on electronics.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
My morning logon fortune was: "I read National Geographic for the same reason as Playboy -- to see places I'm never going to go." :)
They must already be using an "unsigned byte" (or some larger integer)... 10000000b is -128 if you were using a signed byte.
... on the size of your... ahem... brain.
The Atomium is included in the list. Plan your visit for the 6+7 February 2010 and visit FOSDEM 2010 !
Hand in your geek card. A 7-bit counter can store 128 values, and is typically used to store the range 0-127 inclusive. This book contains 128 entries which, assuming they are real geeks and count from 0, will mean that the last one is number 127.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Kids today don't need any more nonsense then they already get. Here is real science:
Get up in the morning.
Drive to work.
Sit in your cube.
Spend 6 hours reading test results.
Enter test results into spreadsheet.
Spend an hour prepping results report.
Send results to senior scientist.
Go home.
Repeat.
Not everyone gets to trudge around rain forests or go globe trotting looking for the next big thing. Most sit in cubicles crunching numbers. Hell not everyone even gets to be in the lab. I remember working with a PhD chemical engineer at SEARS when I was in high school. He left the field because sitting in a cubicle all day staring at rehometer readouts for a blown film line test drove him insaine. 10 years and he never set foot in a lab. The whole of his start in chemistry was hoping to be like his father who also was a chemist (Lots of beakers and burners and condensation tubes and crap with a lab coat). Things have changed now. Kids need to see that part. Deluding kids is not the answer. Science is now, more then ever, a business and the old days are gone.
Not everyone gets to sit at an observatory looking for some celestial wonder.
Most live in Excel spreadsheets and databases.
Kids need some reality before they waste 4 years in college and countless $$$ pursuing their master's and PhD in a field they end up dropping out of once reality sets in.
We suffered enough thanks to Indy when that crap came out. "What do you mean I have to label everything and dig with a brush?!" Where is the "adventure". "What do you mean I don't get to go to Egypt?" I have to sit in a warehouse in Kentucky labeling stuff and making plaster casts?"
Enough "adventure" nonsense with the kids. They need to learn to value the aqusition of knowledge. Knowledge for knowledge's sake. We need people with a passion for real knowledge rather then just "The cool parts".
Please no more science camps. Show them a good helping of real work, stick them in a cube 3 days a week, 8-10 hours a pop.
Science is hard work. Kids need to see that. They don't need magic, they need reality.
Go ahead mod me troll I have karma to burn but we need to get our kids heads on straight.
How many kids want to be astronauts? doctors? pirates? ninjas? Astronomers? Give them a real taste of what it's like.
Want to be a doctor? Here, you get to go to doctor camp where you can spend 14 weeks a year defending yourself against malpractice suits. Hopeful astronomer? Here is a spreadsheet of gamma bursts from XM310203-01. Grab the data from the k:\orbitXM310203-01.xls and see if the gamma burst data shows if it correlates to Dr. Atworsts theory that there is a large object occluding the omission, possible an orbit. Also before heading home make sure you get Grant #44 and Grant #55 applications update for submission.
The horror stories I've seen over the years leads me every time to one factor: the reality of science and the marketing of science have grown so vast that the reailty of science is almost unknown until they get out into the private sector.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
...you have a limited definition of 'beautiful'.
For instance, the Large Hadron Collider. It is, in fact, beautiful. Beautiful in execution, beautiful physics, beautiful. And falls neatly outside your context.
If this book being recommended can bring that sense of beauty to power sub stations and the like, then I think it's a good idea.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Same here. After several tries at more conventional vacations that turned out to be boring (Architecture? meh. Nature? If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. Mountains? pfft), I've given my geek impulses free rein the last few years, and it's wonderful.
I just finished a two-week trip to the UK, where I visited several old mines, a few car and aircraft museums, the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum (thanks to Neal Stephenson) [1] and Bletchley Park.
1: an absolute treat, well worth travelling to the middle of nowhere for
If you go to the TV museum in Ohio you really should take half a day and go visit COSI near downtown Columbus. I spent a lot of time at the old location when I was a kid and absolutely loved it. They moved to a new location a few years back and the wife and I went to check it out last time we were in the area. It might be a bit on the childish side as it is designed to interest children in the sciences and history. But even as an adult I found the exhibits interesting and entertaining.
If you want to tour places, stop by the poorly named "Henry Ford Museum". It has little to do with Mr Ford. It's actually a history museum that simply collected artifacts from the industrial revolution. You'll see various pieces of machinery from the 18 and 1900's along with cars, train, planes, sewing machines, typewriters, combines, steam engines, locomotives, etc... Also right next door is Greenfield Village - Mr Ford bought a bunch of buildings and had them moved here. You can tour Thomas Edisons lab, the homes of various historical figures, the home of the Write Brothers (and I believe the actual shop), and many other interesting buildings taken straight out of history and preserved generations. These are not reproductions, they are the actual buildings. There are also demonstrations of how some things were made in the old days, and I believe you can even get a ride in a model T.
I'm sure most people who visit the Detroit area pass on this the way I'd pass on an Elvis museum just because of the name.
Just got the book and love it ~Ami http://transcendevelopment.com/
This might be slightly off topic, but for anyone interested in a good travel guide, I used the above mentioned guide on my last trip to Hawaii (honeymoon): http://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Traveler-Hawaii-3rd/dp/1426203888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248122652&sr=8-1.
I found it to be much more useful than the standard Frommer's guide. It pointed us to lots of natural wonders (i.e. not tourist traps) and even suggested some good restaurants off the beaten path. What I liked most about the book is that it gave you a numbered guide of important things to see in each location, like having a personal tour guide (in many cases the guide pointed out things I would have easily missed). I think something like The Geek Atlas is a novel idea and would be interested to read its contents and visit the sites mentioned therein, but being an engineer who is constantly surrounded by science and technology, the things I want to see/experience while on vacation rarely have to do with those subjects. For me, vacation is a time to do something different, something out of the ordinary, something that is not part of my daily life. I'll take watching the sunrise over the top of a volcano over visiting the Hague at least 9 times out of 10...
Darn it! We got lots of science & technology places:
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Call me a parochial Dutchman, but if you want a stunning display of science and engineering, the Delta Works and especially the Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier should have been included. Their contribution to human knowledge and just plain awesomeness is easily on a par with the works of M.C. Escher.
And as an added bonus, if you're listing the Escher museum anyway, the Delta Works are just around the corner.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"If there is a fault in the book, it is with its title. When people see Geek Atlas, they might think that this is a book that takes the reader to boring and obscure places, ..."
"Geek Atlas" == boring and obscure places to you? Are you aware of on what website your comments are currently posted?
Damn, I'd love to see Alexandria, as it once was (pre-destruction).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
This is a Nirvana for up and coming science geeks. http://www.exploratorium.edu/mind/
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Yet another great place the book doesn't include: New Jersey's InfoAge Science Center. The center is located in Wall Township (near the shore). It's a hands-on learning center. Originally it was built as a Marconi America R&D facility in 1912. It was a Navy comms lab during WW1, and an Army Signal Corps lab from WW2 until the 1990s. All sorts of amazing things in the history of radio, radar, communications, and computing happened here. It's also got the biggest friggin' satellite dish most people will ever see. Today there's a radio/TV museum, computer museum, shipwreck museum, model trains museum, military vehicles museum, amateur radio museum, and much more. Hours are Sundays 1pm-4pm and other times by appointment. www.infoage.org
They have left out the Radome. Maybe in the next edition. The Radome is the original satellite receiver for the first TV transmissions between Europe and North America. With it's associated telecommunications museum and interesting tours it is a great place for a geek tourist.
Somewhat off topic but it may interest some of you that the book's author also created the open source project POPFile, a popular bayesian spam filter featured previously featured in a story here on Slashdot.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I looked at a handful of his mapped locations, and seriously worry about where he is steering people. Sure, the Joseph Priestly House would be a good place to visit for the budding chemistry geek, but some of the others are seriously misguided.
Take for example the Nikolai Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia. A budding mad scientist should know that Tesla, although Serbian, never set foot in Belgrade. His contributions to science started in Graz, Austria, and then really took off in the US. There is no placemarks for Tesla in Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, nor New York City, where he had his various laboratories, producing things like fluorescent lights and tesla coils.
Or the abundance of atomic bomb test sites, but the absence of places like Edwards Air Force Base, where the speed of sound was first broken. The Glenn-Curtiss museum is included, but not one for the Wright brothers in Dayton, OH.
Other underwhelming things like the Carl Sagan Planet Walk (in Ithaca, NY), should have been dropped all together. I think it went in after he died, and I'm not sure if his widow's pot-smoking paraphernalia shop still exists near the center of the model, anymore.
-- Len
*shrugs*
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hand over your geek card; a signed (two's complement) octet can store up to 127, not 128.
BTW, it'd have been much more geeky if it said 0x80 places...
that will be a bit more interesting then.
I would not normally respond to comments but since your claim to be the editor introduces the Voice Of Authority, let me expand on my observation as a prospective customer.
Perhaps a casual observer, finding this title in a museum shop, might expect that a "Geek Atlas" would refer to real locations that you would find in an atlas. A giant list of German museums and one cemetery full of dead Nobel Prize winners an atlas does not make. This is more of a "Geek Museum Guide", where non-UK parts of Europe are concerned and not too far removed from the pages of say "Rough Guide" or "Lonely Planet"
A list of museums and other European locations of geek interest and pilgrimage would be something that lived up to the title. It probably won't surprise you to hear that I have actually been in the Deutsches Museum, since it is only a wee bit along the road from where I live and it is an absolutely stunning collection of artefacts, including a Van de Graaff Generator (with 3 shows per day) and a couple of meteorites but in terms of being a "location" on an "atlas" it is not significant apart from the opportunity it presents to touch a genuine V2 rocket or buy a copy of the Geek Atlas in the museum shop (or just read it for half an hour to discover that Europe is a bit of an afterthought).
My point was that I would be interested in a book that was a geek atlas that continued to appreciate that a visit to the (listed) Trinity Site (which remains "awesome" despite the fact that it was bulldozed flat) is a tad more connected than a visit to a museum, even after you leave the English speaking world, and consequently contained a richer source of material on Europe as opposed to just Britain and America.
My observations were to express dissappointment that while I am unlikely to visit the Trinity Site which you do mention, I could easily visit so many other sites, such as the reactor at Haigerloch which you don't mention,
So rather than "Hello,sequel", perhaps you might consider "Hello, European Edition".
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Damn, I was in London/Europe up until 4 weeks ago and was thinking "wouldn't it be great if there were a travel guide exactly like this". Of course, it never occurred to me that such a thing would be a dead-tree book.
Oh well, here's my own contribution, if it's not already in the book - the Falkirk wheel, halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. It's a massive rotating boat lift, used to replace a series of locks, quite ingenious the way the two 'buckets' are kept in perfect balance and fascinating to see in action.
Here's a time lapse movie
of it in action.
I'm not going to assume you even have a geek card, because your google-fu is so weak.
ECCE LIBRO II CONTINENTUR
Srsly. Google '"Geek atlas" table of contents'. First link.
The table of contents enumerates 128 chapters, indexing from 1 to 128. So your assumption that all geeks count from zero is unfounded.
If you, in fact, possess a geek card, please report for re-certification.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I am appalled by this review and the reviewer's crappy attempt at explaining why Africa was left out...
And by the way, let's suppose that Egypt is too mainstream (?!). What about Bejaia, Algeria where no one else than Fibbonacci learnt about the Arabic numerals and then spread them through Europe... Maybe that's not geeky enough ?
It's sad to see than even nowadays the education systems continue to insist that nothing happened in the period between the greeks and the renaissance. However, that is zero excuse (even subconsciously) to continue writing books in that frame of mind and call yourself a geek.
I'm not sure what your point is. If you base from 1 instead of 0, then 7 bits is still enough to store 128 distinct values.
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