a glob of nerdishness

You’ve probably heard the story about old tube-powered mainframe computers being susceptible to bug encounters of the insect kind. What you may not know:

• The word “bug” was used to describe glitches in machines before any mainframe incident(s) occurred, according to the software bug article on Wikipedia.
• The first actual bug found (actually Lepidoptera rather than Hemiptera) has been preserved in the Smithsonian’s American History museum, according to an interesting bug list from Ask Tog.