I'm mystified about geeks

[Tea]

We all know a geek, right?

Heck, most of us here probably are one.

Geeks are everywhere. Geeks are born every minute of the day. Geeks (so far as I can tell) might as well have the word "geek" tattoed on their foreheads just after the midwife says "it's a boy, Mrs Jones". Except that would be a waste of time, seeing as you don't need the tattoo to recognise a geek of any age.

I don't think anyone becomes a geek: it's like red hair or blue eyes: either you are a geek or you are not a geek. If you don't like it, dive back into the gene pool and roll the dice again.

Geeks spend most or all of their spare time learning about computers and doing weird stuff with them, such as mending them when Cousin Helen accidentally deletes the Windows folder, or running a program thingie called a "benchmark" on that shiny new expensive video card with the bumpy aluminium bits on it and the extra power connector.

But there is one thing I can't figure out. Answer me this: what did natural-born geeks do before we had computers?

 

[Piyono]

Geeks spend most or all of their spare time learning about computers and doing weird stuff with them... what did natural-born geeks do before we had computers?

The geek occurs in all walks of life and across a broad spectrum of activities.
There are guitar geeks and recording geeks and audio geeks (present!). Woodworking geeks. Politics geeks. Enviro-geeks. Magicians are typically magic geeks while that girl in your abnormal psychology lecture who wouldn't know a CRT from an LCD, but who can't stop playing Monopoly and shesh-besh, is probably a board game geek.

You see, monkey, a geek is simply someone for whom a particular hobby has become a borderline obsession, sometimes to the extent that it impinges on his or her social instincts, assuming those were developed in the first place.

If you need evidence of this get a copy of Outdoor Photography. Flip through it and mutter something about pixel density or bokeh. Do this in conspicuous proximity to Tannin. Behold the nature photography geek emerge. Just don't run this experiment while he's in the store; the effects of two geeks trying to occupy the same body could be catastrophic.

 

[Bozo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek

Bozo :joker:

 

[Tea]

Ahh, thankyou my friend. That explains everything.

Tannin, it seems, is a serial geek. (Sort of like serial monogamy only not so friendly.) Doubtless there are periods in his past that he hasn't bothered to inform me of, so the list is incomplete, but to my knowledge he has, at various times, been a guitar geek, a recording geek, an audio geek, a politics geek, and an enviro-geek, but not (so far as I know) a woodworking geek, probably because he wasn't any good at it. (Although, now that I think of it, major lack of talent never stopped him being any of the other geeky things he has been, so why did he never get the woodworking geek thing? I know that there are some decent woodworking tools out in the shed, all covered in rust now, so it's not as if he never tried the woodworking thing.

Bit of a mystery there.

 

[jtr1962]

But there is one thing I can't figure out. Answer me this: what did natural-born geeks do before we had computers?

Probably spend hours in the library. Now what did we do before libraries? I'll guess that the alchemists/wizards of old would probably have been nerds had they been born 500 years later.

At least on the bright side being a geek ( or nerd) these days doesn't have the same social stigma as being a leper. The general public (i.e. them) actually sees the value in people who can decipher a bunch of arcane lines of code, or put together a bin of assorted electronic parts which mostly look alike into something useful. In fact, I think nerds revel in having stuff most people couldn't begin to understand be second nature to them. Yes, my name is Joe, and I am a nerd (even though I really don't look the part). ;-)

 

[Tannin]

No mystery there, Tea. I wasn't any good at it.

 

[Tea]

But you did lots of things you wasn't any good at.

 

[Tannin]

Name three!

 

[Tea]

1: guitar
2: rockclimbing (you were a serious climbing geek, according to my sources - hell, you wrote books about it!)
3: recording

 

[Tannin]

Ahh, we have a misunderstanding here. Those three things you mentioned, I wasn't particularly good at. True. But that's a whole world away from my short and unlovely woodworking career: at woodworking I wasn't merely not very good, I was bad. It's very hard to aquire geek status at something your auntie can do 5 times better than you can.

 

[Tannin]

By the way, Piyono, geekdom has never, ever impinged on my social instincts. Never had any, not to speak of. People who don't share at least a little bit of my geek-obsessions essentially don't exist.

(I don't mean there aren't any, just that I don't pay them any attention.)

(But I'm good at faking it. Enough of it, at any rate, to negotiate quite complex conversations without ever actually noticing that there is a human interaction going on. What the non-person on the other side of the conversation thinks about that I have no idea. They don't generally shout, wave their arms around, or call the police, so I must be doing OK.)

 

[Tea]

Did it ever occur to you, Tannin, that the other person in these non-conversations of yours might very well be just going through the socially-required motions without ever noticing that you exist? That this other person is, in their own way, just like you - oblivious to anything that doesn't fall within the narrow confines of their selected interests?

 

[Tannin]

Who?

 

[Tea]

I think that's a "no".

 

[Tannin]

Julie Smith defined a geek as "a bright young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who felt so little kinship with his own planet that he routinely traveled to the ones invented by his favorite authors

That, in a nutshell, is me circa 1978. (Several others of us here as well, I suspect.)

Circa 2008, I'm a less-bright not-so-young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who feels so little kinship with his own species that he routinely travels to his own planet, or at least to those remote parts of it which haven't been irrevocably buggered yet.

 

[udaman]

That, in a nutshell, is me circa 1978. (Several others of us here as well, I suspect.)

Circa 2008, I'm a less-bright not-so-young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who feels so little kinship with his own species that he routinely travels to his own planet, or at least to those remote parts of it which haven't been irrevocably buggered yet.

Me circa 1978, post high-school yearbook photographer (Oly OM1 & 2 ), was science/pre-med curriculum while dabbling in computers. My CS prof, had an Altair(sp?) box with dual 8in floppy drives , with acoustic coupler for command line connections to mainframe university computers. But soon as I turned 21yr's old...the 80's popculture druggy experimentation, high-end Champagne & Cocaine...etc, only lasted a few years, then I became a winegeek when I discovered great red wines (as opposed to the usually crappy Merlot/Cabernets/Bordeaux blends...cue in Miles from Sideways...super lame movie, btw)! A corkhead . Been going downhill ever since, lol.

So I take it Tannin has been to that "Monsters" country to see the origins of modern/popculture flowers before it's too late?

One of the best places on Earth to see the results of the evolution of flowering plants is the Hengduan Mountains in southwestern China, which span the regions of Sichuan, Hunan and Tibet. This is the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world. But to a plant lover it feels strangely familiar, because this is where many of the flowers in your garden came from.

First Flower


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3405_flower.html

hardkor botany geeks on this Nova program

NARRATOR: Whether it be finding one rare flower or one unique fossil, they are both essential parts of understanding the evolution of flowering plants.
One of the things that make the Hengduan Mountains such a rich breeding ground for plant life is the variety of climates. They like to say, here, that you can experience all four seasons in one day. Within a few hours you can drive from mountains, where the air is damp and cold, to valleys, where it's summer and there are cacti at the side of the road.
DAN HINKLEY: It is incredibly hot.
NARRATOR: The unique conditions allowed many of the flowers here to survive the last Ice Age. In other countries around the globe thousands of species of plants were stripped clean by the glaciers. The Hengduan Mountains have, in effect, served as a safety deposit box of temperate diversity.

 

[ddrueding]

Everyone in my Tango group is a geek. The instructor is a laser geek, an assistant is a materials science geek, other regulars are AI geeks and robot geeks. But they are also all Tango geeks. We'll get together for a "practice" and never play any music at all, obsessing about a single combination of movements and the lead/follow architecture; deciding how this movement fits into our document which describes the "unified theory of tango". I don't think geeks are geeky about one thing, but all things they bother with. They simply bother with less things, and are geeky about all of them.

 

[ddrueding]

The trick is, they are all "official" geeks. I'm the only one without at least one PhD in the whole crowd. Does this make me less of a geek?

 

[Piyono]

By the way, Piyono, geekdom has never, ever impinged on my social instincts. Never had any, not to speak of. People who don't share at least a little bit of my geek-obsessions essentially don't exist.

(I don't mean there aren't any, just that I don't pay them any attention.)

(But I'm good at faking it. Enough of it, at any rate, to negotiate quite complex conversations without ever actually noticing that there is a human interaction going on. What the non-person on the other side of the conversation thinks about that I have no idea. They don't generally shout, wave their arms around, or call the police, so I must be doing OK.)

Same, although I don't have quite so much skill in maintaining a conversations past initial salutations, unless, of course the conversation happens to be revolving around the merits of running pentodes as dual triodes or the finer points of drum mic-ing or the benefits of lead-free solder.

Exaggeration? Perhaps, but the reality is that I am able to speak extemporaneously at length on a very limited range of topics: basically my hobbies and interests. I've never been one for light conversation. Understandable when you consider that I'm constantly at a loss for words, expressions and references. I know what I want to say but there's a huge chasm between my thoughts and feelings and my ability to express them. I'm not the quickest analytical thinker on the planet, and nor — though I try — am I the quickest wit.

Guess that disqualifies me as a conversation geek...

 

[Piyono]

The trick is, they are all "official" geeks. I'm the only one without at least one PhD in the whole crowd. Does this make me less of a geek?

I think geekyness is a measure of one's commitment to a particular discipline or interest, accreditation notwithstanding. No, not having a PhD does not make you a lesser geek, just a less highly-decorated one.

 

[sechs]

The trick is, they are all "official" geeks. I'm the only one without at least one PhD in the whole crowd. Does this make me less of a geek?

It makes you under-educated.

Maybe it's time to get away from California.

 

[timwhit]

It makes you under-educated.

Maybe it's time to get away from California.

DD is always the one that is trying to convince people to move to California.

 

[ddrueding]

Indeed. Especially geeks. California is without a doubt the place to be. Houston (where I am now), on the other hand, isn't. At "Bush International Airport" they actually make announcements that if you make rude comments to police they will arrest you. Who didn't figure that out on their own?

 

[sechs]

DD is always the one that is trying to convince people to move to California.

That's not the problem. See here:

A. From someplace else? Come to California! Our government is screwed up and the education system underfunded. We need more smart people!

B. From California and *still* here? The above explained.

 

[e_dawg]

I think geekiness is much more often the manifestation of psychiatric / psychological conditions to various degrees than we give it credit for. Asperger's syndrome, OCPD, SAPD, AvPD, overfocused or hyperfocused ADD, etc. Sometimes it's complexes formed as a result of upbringing at various stages of development, but mostly, it's a combination of nature and nurture.