There is an xkcd comic by Randall Munroe titled Nerd Sniping. In the comic, Black hat creates a game along a busy highway. When a mathematician, engineer, computer scientist or other nerdy type crosses the road, he yells out an interesting problem. He wins points if the victim freezes to think about the problem and is hit by a passing truck. Mathematicians are worth more points than physicists.

Poetically, today I got nerd sniped by a different xkcd comic. Bracket shows a fictional tournament listing people or items that are put against each other. Usually, the names are related by similar sounding names or by theme. For example, Mr. Spock, Doctor Spock and Doctor Octopus make one bracket. I remember a set of polls to run the tournament, but I can’t find a link to it.

I was looking through the list. I saw a few that I recognized but are less well known such as Amanda Palmer. I found one I didn’t know, Mark Shuttleworth. I went to his Wikipedia page and saw instantly why he was on the list.

The nerd sniping happened when I saw how much money he paid to be launched as a space tourist in 2002. The article gave an inflation adjusted value to 6 significant figures which was obviously more precise than is mathematically justified.

I spent an hour fixing that. Most of the time was learning how the {{Inflation}} tag works on Wikipedia. Nerd sniped!

Fortunately, I didn’t get hit by a truck!