Bored With The Internet – Really?

Down Memory Lane

Saturday mornings are invariably lazy here in London (for me). The day is dedicated to do all the stuff I wouldn’t like to do during the weekdays during heavy workload. Not much of grocery was needed today and the success of Operation Cleanup meant some free time today. Not to forget, I managed to achieve a great feat my going a step ahead on my major coursework (I won’t bore you guys with the details, for now).

So, completely free and at east, I plugged in one of my portable hard drives and started going through the videos and pictures on my mobile phone backups. I do this whenever I miss the great time I had at PNEC and those awesome friends.

The word ‘robot’ forms an integral part of my life, and especially the year 2007 of my life can easily be called the Robot Year. I won’t even give any details of that robot but due to that most of our time (4 of us) was spent in the project lab at PNEC which we had the freedom to use at all times.

I have found some nice videos of the robot during its development phase which I plan to post at some other time, but for now here is an interesting video of how geeks light up a cigarette. The location is, unsurprisingly, the same project lab. The time is probably very late at night and the action is definitely a consequence of frustration. The guy in the video is a brilliant techie!

Isn’t this innovative?

NOTE: I was forced to remove the original background sound

You're An Engineer If….

I found these interesting points about engineers on a website which I’m reproducing here with my own comments in italics on some of them.

You’re and engineer if:

• You have no life – and you can PROVE it mathematically. Atleast we can prove it
• You enjoy pain. We can take it!
• You know vector calculus but you can’t remember how to do long division. Errr…true!!
• You chuckle whenever anyone says “centrifugal force”. Ofcourse! the fools hardly know anything about it!
• You’ve actually used every single function on your graphing calculator. Why not?!
• It is sunny and 70 degrees outside, and you are working on a computer. We ‘work’ unlike others who waste time!
• You think in “math“. LOGIC, baby!
• You’ve calculated that the World Series actually diverges. Not yet, maybe one day…
• You hesitate to look at something because you don’t want to break down its wave function. Ok, yeh zyada hogya
• You have a pet named after a scientist. Hate pets!
• You laugh at jokes about mathematicians. Better than sardar jokes
• You can translate English into Binary. Actually..I CAN!
• You can’t remember what’s behind the door in the engineering building which says “Exit“. Oops!
• You have to bring a jacket with you, in the middle of summer, because there’s a wind-chill factor in the lab. Hahaha
• You are completely addicted to caffeine. Sure am!
• You avoid doing anything because you don’t want to contribute to the eventual heat-death of the universe. Shutup!
• You consider ANY non-engineering course “easy“. Because they ARE!
• When your professor asks you where your homework is, you claim to have accidentally determined its momentum so precisely, that according to Heisenberg it could be anywhere in the universe. Good idea, never tried it though..
• The “fun” center of your brain has deteriorated from lack of use. Lame!
• You’ll assume that a “horse” is a “sphere” in order to make the math easier. Again, hadd hogayi!
• The blinking 12:00 on someone’s clock draws you in like a tractor beam to fix it. Yeah, because I can!
• You bring a computer manual / technical journal as vacation reading. Oh yeah, its interesting!
• You can’t help eavesdropping in computer stores… and correcting the salesperson. Because all sales people are a bunch of liars!
• You have any “Dilbert” comics displayed in your work area. Hmm..no!
• You have a habit of destroying things in order to see how they work. Isn’t that fun?
• You have never backed up your hard drive. Don’t even get me started!
• You haven’t bought any new underwear or socks for yourself since you got married. I’ll note that when time comes..
• You spent more on your calculator than on your wedding ring. Not applicable..
• Your favorite James Bond character is “Q,” the guy who makes the gadgets. LOL!
• You understood more than five of these jokes. All of ‘em!
• You make a copy of this list, and post it on your door (or your web page/blog !)

Homo Nerdus

“Nerds are the ones who don’t go to the party so they can stay home and do homework; geeks bring their homework to the party.” —David Anderegg, Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (2007)

Is the word nerd an insult or not? Until recently, there was no doubt; in fact, most dictionaries call nerd an offensive term, used to insult a person’s appearance, hygiene, or social skills. That sense of the term has been around since at least the early 1950s. The 28 October 1951 issue of Newsweek tells us that “in Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, ­regrettably, a nerd.” The word nerd also appears in the 1950 Dr. Seuss story If I Ran the Zoo, but he was referring to a ­fictional animal, not a socially inept person.

Now, however, most reference guides also include a second definition for nerd that’s practically a compliment. For example, Encarta defines a nerd as a “single-minded enthusiast: somebody who is considered to be excessively interested in a subject or activity that is regarded as too technical or scientific.” The phrases “excessively interested” and “too technical or scientific” still give the definition an odor of insult, but that bit about being a “single-minded enthusiast” doesn’t sound bad at all. Wikipedia’s ­definition is similarly ambiguous: “a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities.”

Some folks are taking the positive aspects of the word’s definitions and running with them. That is, people are enthusiastically embracing their inner (and outer) nerd. For example, the online merchandiser Cafe Press has a Geek and Nerd Gifts section where you can buy T-shirts and other items with slogans like “Talk Nerdy to Me,” “Nerd Girl,” and “I [Heart] My Nerd.” There’s even a Nerd Pride Day (also called Geek Pride Day), which is celebrated on 25 May, the day the first Star Wars movie was released, in 1977.

All this pro-nerd feeling is spilling over into the language, too, with nerd-related coinages popping up like pocket protectors at a comic-book convention. For example, the population of nerds taken as a whole is called nerdom, and a person’s nerdy traits and characteristics represent their nerdity. The latter term is used often by the psychologist David Anderegg in his engaging book Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them [Tarcher, 2007]. The whole nerd-is-cool meme is often summarized in the formerly oxymoronic phrase nerd chic.

Any long and nerd-oriented activity is known as a nerdathon, and if that activity happens to be a computer game or a LAN party (a gathering where people bring their own computers, connect them together into a local area network, and then play games against one another), it’s called a nerdstorm.

As yet another example of the digital DIY movement I talked about in my column last June, nerds are embracing crafts of various kinds. For example, some nerds are baking cakes in the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog or an Xbox 360 console. These are known as gamecakes, and the people who bake them are gamecakers. The desserts are examples of a larger genre called nerdcraft, and the people who engage in such activities are called nerdcrafters.

On the music front, there are artists who specialize in a form of rap music with lyrics relating to computers, technology, and engineering (I am not making this up), a genre known as nerdcore (from its original association with the hard?core music genre), though many people prefer the term geeksta (a play on gangsta).

Nerds are even starting to congregate in the same areas (outside of Silicon Valley, that is), a trend first recognized by the urban analyst Joel Kotkin. He uses the term nerdistan to refer to any upscale and largely self-contained suburb or town with a sizable population of high-tech workers employed in nearby office parks that are dominated by high-tech industries. Those employees with vested stock options in successful tech start-ups are known as millionerds or, if they started the company, entreprenerds.

All these nerdologisms can’t hide the fact that, for nongeeks, the word nerd is still something of an insult (more so than the now almost neutral term geek but less so than the truly insulting terms dork and dweeb). The difference is that now the nerds simply shrug their shoulders, push up their glasses, and go back to whatever they were obsessing about. They’re proud of their nerdhood, and they know that living nerdily is the best revenge.
This article is reproduced, as is, from the June 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum. (Link)