Bwog diligently follows up on the Mario Kart tournament previously announced on its very pages.

Friday night was a veritable throw-down/show-down of epically nerdy scale. Eight players, united by Bwog, gathered in a Ruggles suite to flaunt their mastery of a game they'd been playing since elementary school. Mario Kart, perhaps the most beloved game on perhaps the most beloved console of the mid 90s, had brought together two Ruggles juniors, four boys from EC's Watson House, Bwog's own CML, and a hawk-loving girl named Courtney. All sat beside a door frame topped with the message that on November 1, 2007, Jacob (present on tourney-day under the game name YRYR) went 29-0 in Mario Kart.

Hurry! From 6-9 tonight, the Blue Key Society hosts a competitive, campus wide Spelling Bee in the Wien Lounge. ROAR, LION, ROAR! [Results after the jump!]

For almost every student, Spellcheck is an indispensable tool. Thanks to Bill Gates and his brainchild, Microsoft Word, the once tedious process of editing a paper for spelling errors has been reduced to a series of simple clicks. But then, there are those other students...

Yes, at Columbia, there is a strange breed of students whose spelling capacities surpass those of that supercilious dancing paper-clip icon. These students spell with natural confidence and verbal intuition. Their vocabularies are so rich that while Spellcheck may flounder over obvious Greek derivatives, like, dialogism and phyllophyllin, Columbia's superior strain of spellers can easily tackle any word.

This week's question for Bwog comes from Daily Editor David Iscoe who wants to know if hitting an electronic device such as a computer is a good way to get it to work? David requests an engineer's advice. Lucikly, webmaster Zach van Schouwen was on hand to answer David's question.

"The master walks in to find the student flipping his machine on and off in an effort to solve a technical failure. The master shakes his head, and says "It is futile to power-cycle the machine in lieu of understanding the problem." The master then flipped the machine on and off, causing it to work immediately. At that moment, the student became enlightened," Zach explains. He then clarifies that the official term of computer repair geeks is "percussion maintenance" and that yes, hitting a computer—for example if a laptop's wireless slides out of the motherboard—can quite possibly get it to work.

The idea is that hitting a computer can "dislodge the heads if they've become stuck on the platters, or otherwise misaligned," says Phil Dotree of Associated Content. However, he warns that the risk of damaging your hard drive is high if you choose to slap your computer around a bit.

Ask Bwog thanks the always-helpful Zach van Schouwen and Phil Dotree of associatedcontent.com, whoever he may be.

This editorial is tagged as "hope" and "Star Wars"

The fictional kids that the fictional Albus Dumbledore taught at their completely made up school don't have to worry that their fictional teacher is going to fake sexually harass them.

"Violence is like selling motherfucking hot flowers."

For a lot of us, this title is an apt summarization of senior year of high school, no?

Mmm, yeah. Fairly certain Kazahkstanis would rather you didn't refer to their home as "Land of Borat."

Coming up today on Bwog:

How to fix your computer

What's going on in the Internets

Your professor's voicemail

As far as aliens, UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, God and the NBA draft lottery are concerned, the poster says it all: I want to believe. I want to credit The Conspiracy with Patrick Ewing's 15 brilliant years as a New York Knick. But Mulder had it right: be lief and doubt are so closely intertwined that true belief is better left to the crackpots.

By such conventional standards, Josie is a crackpot. I spotted her handing out pink quartersheets near the entrance to Lerner; because of her slight build, youngish appearance and thrift store, hipster asceticism I mistook her for a musician promoting a concert. Not a bad guess--but in fact she was a member of the Society of the Ancients promoting the notion that aliens deserve an assist on everything from the pyramids to iPods.

Noah Corwin writes in to say...

Arrg! I almost forgot (um...avast) that it is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yes, it is a geek thing, like Pi Day (3/14), Mole Day (10/23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.), Towel Day, Darwin Day, and Friday (well maybe not Friday).

And while we're on the topic of supreme nerds, Noah also notes Brian Greene and Dave Bayer both have an Erdös-Bacon number of 4, and David Albert has one of 7.

As per wikipedia:
"An individual's Erdös-Bacon number is the sum of their Erdös number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös—and Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which they are separated from actor Kevin Bacon. To have a finite Erdös-Bacon number, it is necessary (but not sufficient) for one to have both appeared in a film and co-authored an academic paper."