After noticing it in hundreds of Google searches, I'm finally beginning to appreciate the joys of Wikipedia, the first encyclopedia written entirely by nerds. Well, that's not entirely accurate. It's an open-content encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and although this might seem like a recipe for vandalism and shoddy writing, it appears that the discipline of anonymous editors and thousands of contributors actually works: I've discovered good and informative articles on almost every subject I've tried to find, ranging from the Thirty Years' War to Amphiaraus to the Pet Shop Boys. Because Wikipedia is so easy to use and so hard to stump, I've begun to use it, rather to my surprise, as my default reference book. (Its nerdish origins are only occasionally visible, as in such features as its comprehensive articles on every alien race in the Star Trek universe.)

(Unfortunately, not even Wikipedia has heard of some of those Russian guys in Noah's geneaology.)