Computer Knowledge to the Rescue!

Regular Expressions to the Rescue!

“Whenever I learn a new skill,” writes Randall Munroe, author and artist behind the incredibly nerdy webcomic xkcd, “I concoct elaborate scenarios where it lets me save the day.” In his latest comic, he illustrates this:

Click the comic to see it on its original page.

(Nerd alert: in order to get the joke in the comic, you need to know what regular expressions are. They’re strings of characters — called “strings” for short — that describe or match a given set of strings, according to rules. Think of them as being similar to the “search and replace” function in your favourite word processor, but on steroids.)

HTTP and Computational Complexity to the Rescue!

Back in 2003, I started dating a woman whom I thought was a webmaster and a computer science graduate. A reader of this blog recognized this woman by her description and email me a warning, saying that she wasn’t who she said she was — she was in fact a con artist and identity thief. She used enough jargon to seem convincing as a webmaster and programmer (not to just me, but a number of nerds), but I managed to catch her when she was unable to explain the difference between HTTP GET and HTTP POST and when I tricked her into lying that she proved that P = NP. The whole story is here in an old entry of mine, titled The Girl Who Cried Webmaster.

Radio Shack TRS-80 Nerds to the Rescue!

When writing about computer skills saving the day, I remembered that Radio Shack made a couple of superhero comics in which Superman got an assist from some young nerds equipped with the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a staple of young nerds back in the early 1980s:

A little Googling landed me at X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut’s CosmoBlog, where he not only features the covers of these cheesy classics, he’s also giving away the comics!