I was reading an article on the Cracked.com website the other day and it got me to thinking about the deplorable state of 21st century nerddom. The article was entitled 7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics, just the sort of thing that would attract an old-school nerd like me. While several of the miracle materials were really not all that novel; carbon nanotubes, aerogels, perfluorocarbons, one that did catch my eye was transparent alumina. I'm a regular reader of Cracked.com, so I know sometimes these guys feign stupid for its comedic value, but it was clear to me that they genuinely didn't know the difference between alumina and aluminum. That's when I realized these guys are geeks, not nerds. Geeks like all the same stuff we nerds like; D&D, Star Wars action figures, Monty Python movies. The difference is, nerds know about other subjects as well. There are two topics in particular, that are near and dear to the nerd heart, science and military history. A geek teenager may have a poster of Optimus Prime on his wall, but a nerd is just as likely to have one of Albert Einstein.
Now, once upon a time, nerds were the dominant species. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I and my friends were the school nerd club. We were the only people at home on Saturday night playing D&D. We didn't have to worry about wannabes stealing our subculture. Nobody wanted it. We would hang out in the school cafeteria debating the implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for Star Trek transporter technology and everyone else would look at us like we were aliens, and we liked it that way. Nowadays, it's cool to be a nerd. Everyone from Vin Diesel to Shaq is now down with the culture. But it's obvious to me, they are all geeks, not nerds.
At this point, I should be clear. I'm not trying to bash on geeks. They're pretty cool and most women at gaming conventions are likely to be geeks, rather than nerds. However, I do have to say that the lack of knowledge most geeks display of topics of such vital importance can be disconcerting and even a bit aggravating. So, to all you geeks out there who yearn to be nerds, you need to do some homework. Read some non-fiction once in awhile. As a public service, I provide below, a list of 10 people you should know something about. It's a good start.
Simo Häyhä
Yuri Gagarin
Edward Teller
Sun Tzu
Nikola Tesla
Hannibal
Niccoló Machiavelli
Hernando Cortés
Maxwell Planck
Heinrich Himmler
-Rognar-
By the way, you get bonus nerd points for being able to produce all those accented characters in that list using just the "Alt" button and the number pad on your keyboard.
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8 comments:
I can do 7 out of 10. Does that make me geek or nerd?
Marginal nerd, which 3 did you miss?
Simo Häyhä
Yuri Gagarin
Edward Teller
The rest I could identify to some degree or another.
I was a bit surpised when I looked up Gagarin but I'm not terribly shocked that I couldn't identify the other two. A finnish sniper is a tad obscure. And there are so many brilliant physicists that I'm terribly surprised that I didn't recognize Teller.
I figured Hayha might be one. He's the most deadly sniper in history by a wide margin, but the only WWII battles you ever hear about in the mainstream media anymore are D-Day and Pearl Harbour. If you didn't know better, you'd assume nothing else happened between 1939 and 1945.
well Dieppe was 1942 and D-day was 1944 but yes, I didn't study the other theatres of the war and only bits and pieces of the North Africa/Italian campaigns and even less about the Pacific campaigns (although I studied the fall of Hong Kong and Singapore a bit).
I always found the eastern front much more interesting, maybe because there was so little mentioned about it in North America. The absolute brutality of Stalingrad, the utter horror of Leningrad, the awesome scale of the battle of Kursk and the sheer magnitude of the slaughter. It's almost impossible to really grasp the full scope of that conflict.
I couldnt get Simo and Teller. The others are pretty standard household nerd names. Although I have heard these names from time to time, I am not really an authority on any of them, aside from Sun Zi (yes, Sun Zi. The Tsu or Tse romanization is an abomination to anyone that seriously studies Chinese history.. yeah, all ten of us).
The Art of War (Sun Zi Bing Fa) is an awesomely simple ancient work that has incredibly diverse application. A must read for any nerd, regardless of vocation.
The thing about Sun Tzu (or Sun Zi) is that he may actually be mythical. There are some apparent inconsistencies between The Art of War and what archaeologists know about the period he was supposed to have lived in. Some historians think the manuscript was written later.
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