8 posts tagged “nerd”
Jet-setting to the other side on a red-eye flight with no sleep, this weekend I spent my days and nights remembering the very good city of New York. A weekend alone is not nearly enough to trace the lines of my nostalgia for the city, but I can't complain since the hours were action-packed and always filled to the brim with good people.
With help and encouragement from dear ee.en, I attended 8-bit-people and The Tank's all weekend Chiptune bash Blipfest 2007. Held at the Eyebeam gallery in Chelsea, the space was never left with an empty echo. Throes of candy-colored concert goers, from the mandatory city hipsters to the graying groups of vintage gamers, pulsated to the 8-bit performances and basked in the lite-brite like colors of the set. I spent a couple of nights dancing, nerd crowd-surfing, and bit-bumping, but the experience alone was intense enough to tire me out by the third night.
To give you a taste of what was had (and what should be hoped for in the next installment of Blipfest 2008) here's a trailer of last year's performance :
Tee hee. Photochop jokes! NICE FLARE!!! (thanks Raf! :D)
69 % Nerd, 39% Geek, 47% Dork
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.
Congratulations!
THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST
I couldn't help it. I had to share.
I love TI's original What You Know and in most cases would likely roll my eyes over any you tube's white kid's re-interpretation. But the math nerd in me swoons for this kind of humor. Delightfully awkward mathletes rapping about their ability to integrate? Yes, please.
Plus, instead of TI, they call themselves TI-84. That's a gold star right there. Straight up.
Maybe I'm behind in certain facets of internet education, but today I learned that the internet's 'diameter' is 19. What does that mean? One of my classmates explained the theoretical diameter with a complicated digression of graph and network theories, but this guy makes it pretty easy to understand:
Have you ever played the game "Six Degrees Of Separation"? You start out with a person (often a movie star), and then see if you can relate them to another movie star in six or less connections. For example, how would you connect Julia Roberts to Sean Connery?
Well, Julia Roberts starred with Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman", and Richard Gere starred with Sean Connery in "First Knight". That's two degrees right there.
The internet diameter is similar. How many degrees of separation are there between any two randomly selected web pages? How many clicks does it take to get from one web page to another? Researchers have done studies and calculations to try to determine the answer to this question, and the average "distance" in clicks between any two web pages is known as the diameter of the web.
As of the turn of the millenium, the diameter of the internet was approximately 19 clicks.
There you go! It's 19. Now you've learned something! Apparently, if the internet increases by 1000%, the diameter will only barely increase to maybe 20. Crazy pills!
*snort*
The two magazines I subscribe to are wired and flaunt. I encountered both initially on one of my bi-monthly magazine hunts (which usually takes place at Fry's Electronics or Borders). I have this addiction where I will go to the large magazine racks and scavange for covers that intreigue me, usually in the art/design/nerd sections. Sometimes I'll pick up four or five obscure magazines that cost way to much, but are worth the purchase for inspiration and wall hang ups.
The first time I saw wired this cover was shown. I'm a total sucker for Japanese anything, and at the time was pretty deep in some Animes, Mangas, and RPG Video Games (*snort*). Naturally, an awesome cover with a gleaming Anime mecha-babe on it made me instantly grab the issue. After I read through it from front to back, I knew I needed to get this magazine every month. Now I have to fight with my siblings and dad for my issue because they like it too.
The first time I saw flaunt was when Brad Pitt was the featured celebrity. I had (okay, I have) an über crush on Mr. Pitt (yeah, like everybody else) and Flaunt's combination of sleek design and excellent photography grabbed me. It's a little more pricey than your average celeb/fashion magazine, but the price is worth it. You get great articles on pop culture, whats hip, and all the new legitamately interesting movies, music, and gallery showings in all of the big cities. While I'm sure their topics are propelled by whatever sponsors they have (like every other magazine) I feel as though Flaunt makes an effort to weed out any flop material. They always have two covers to their issues; the front one being a design/artistic piece and the one behind the front displaying the featured celebrity of the issue.
