I identify as a nerd and I know what I like without needing input from you guys.

But I am interested as to what you think greater nerdkind like. Because a lot of you seem to know what all muslims like, without being muslim, or what all gay people like, without being gay. So I'd like to know what all you non-nerds know that nerds like. I just want to see if it stacks up against my own experience and how much validity there is in stereotype and caricature.

Hi Toni,

You might not get many bites since very few of us on OLO are non-nerds :(

Joe

Dear Toni,

Ah, Bless Dr Seuss for the word nerd
in his book, "If I Ran The Zoo."

"And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo
And bring back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo
A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker too!"

What do nerds like?

The ones I happen to know are really passionate
about stuff. They like things like fantasy and sci-fi
novels, role-playing games,
video games, comic books, non-mainstream music -
classical, progressive rock, techno. They're shy
and quirky and very knowledgeable about particular
subjects.

I like the definition given on the web :

Nerd - a four letter word with a six-figure income.

Perhaps you had better define nerd Toni.

I have always assumed, without any great thought, that a nerd was a person whose lack of coordination made them incompetent at physical activities & sports, so they gravitated to desk type activities, particularly computer use, since they were developed.

My idea may be a combination of nerd & geek, but my thoughts are,

A nerd would rather spend a day in a Paris art gallery, than a Solomon islands village.

A nerd would rather be driven than drive.

A nerd would be a lousy driver, incapable of concentrating on such activities,

A nerd would never race a car, jump a horse, fly a jet fighter, or sail a yacht around the world, as he would consider these dangerous activities.

How did I do? Did I come close, or am I completely off the track?

I want to know everything about everything, but have what I consider a Readers Digest mind, as interested in almost useless trivia as mathematical formula. I also have done all the activities mentioned above. Does that make me a nerd, geek, jock or just normal?

Continued.

Continued

I went to school with 2 brothers. One read Greek mythology under his desk during maths 2 honours classes, & still topped the class. He was then an honours graduate from Sydney Uni, in some math area. The other built a go kart out of a lawn mower, before go karts existed, but struggled to pass his intermediate, probably due to lack of interest.

The first, a nerd I think, struggled to make a living playing the Sydney town hall organ, & flogging self published cassettes of his music, the other made a lot of money with his engineering business. He is my idea of the opposite of a nerd.

Have I got it right?

Nerds like introspecting about why they are still virgins.

Toward the end of the ABC news the announcer will say, "now to sport". At that point I leave the room. I was unaware of the existence of Andy Gibb until a newspaper announced his death. When Bush called North Korea, Iran and Iraq an axis of evil I thought it would be more appropriate to call them a triangle of evil since two points determine a line. He was geometrically handicapped.

I think I'm a nerd.

Nerds like:

1. Processing information about science, nature, history and philosophy
2. Doubting received wisdom
3. analytic number theory
4. Analytic treatment of religion
5. Bach & Mozart

Nerds don’t like:
1. using words like fantastic, awesome unless the former refers to something not real and the latter refers to the Grand Canyon
2. true believers
3. Having to endure the company of people enthusiastic about sports, country/rock music and TV sitcoms
4. Bible study

I don't know too much about a 'nerd' or a 'geek' or anything else for that matter ?

However I've been called many things during my working life, one such epithet very close to the word 'NERD' only it began with the letter
'T' and was spelt 'urd ?

WTF?

Nerds do like all the things mentioned by david f plus much more.

The uncoordinated Nerd is a Hollywood construct.

True Nerds generally have exceptional motor coordination and often excel in technical areas – computer studies included.

The classical Nerd has the Myers-Briggs ISTP personality type.

Examples of Nerds with this personality type include:
Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey,The Dalai Lama, Vladimir Putin, Erwin Rommel, Donald Rumsfeld, Ron Paul, Yulia Tymoshenko, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, Eminem, Scarlett Johansson, Phil Ivey, Snoop Dogg, Demi Moore and Bruce Lee.

There are many other examples of the Nerd personality type. They are usually masters of their craft.

nerds like
looking at girls but can never talk to them
warhammer figurines
arguing about batman vs ironman
chess
telescopes
living with mum
Dr Who
Starwars or Startrek NOT both

//You might not get many bites since very few of us on OLO are non-nerds//

Fail.

//The ones I happen to know are really passionate
about stuff. They like things like fantasy and sci-fi
novels, role-playing games,
video games, comic books, non-mainstream music//

Pass.

//Nerd - a four letter word with a six-figure income.//

Fail.

//Perhaps you had better define nerd Toni.//

No, see the point is that that is being left as an exercise for the reader.

//A nerd would rather spend a day in a Paris art gallery, than a Solomon islands village.//

Pass.

//A nerd would rather be driven than drive.

A nerd would be a lousy driver, incapable of concentrating on such activities,

A nerd would never race a car, jump a horse, fly a jet fighter, or sail a yacht around the world, as he would consider these dangerous activities.//

Fail.

//The first, a nerd I think, struggled to make a living playing the Sydney town hall organ, & flogging self published cassettes of his music, the other made a lot of money with his engineering business. He is my idea of the opposite of a nerd.//

Fail.

//Nerds like introspecting about why they are still virgins.//

Qualified pass: nerds who are still virgins do enjoy that but not all nerds are still virgins. Nerds who lose their virginity do not renounce their right to nerdhood.

//Toward the end of the ABC news the announcer will say, "now to sport". At that point I leave the room. I was unaware of the existence of Andy Gibb until a newspaper announced his death. When Bush called North Korea, Iran and Iraq an axis of evil I thought it would be more appropriate to call them a triangle of evil since two points determine a line. He was geometrically handicapped.//

Pass with flying colours.

//Nerds like:

1. Processing information about science, nature, history and philosophy
2. Doubting received wisdom
3. analytic number theory
4. Analytic treatment of religion
5. Bach & Mozart

Nerds don’t like:
1. using words like fantastic, awesome unless the former refers to something not real and the latter refers to the Grand Canyon
2. true believers
3. Having to endure the company of people enthusiastic about sports, country/rock music and TV sitcoms
4. Bible study//

Pass X 8. Only one fail (I don't mind Bible study, as long as it counted as literary analysis). Are you cheating, david f?

//True Nerds generally have exceptional motor coordination and often excel in technical areas//

Pass.

//computer studies included.//

Fail.

//The classical Nerd has the Myers-Briggs ISTP personality type.//

Fail with flying colours.

//Examples of Nerds with this personality type include:
Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey,The Dalai Lama, Vladimir Putin, Erwin Rommel, Donald Rumsfeld, Ron Paul, Yulia Tymoshenko, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, Eminem, Scarlett Johansson, Phil Ivey, Snoop Dogg, Demi Moore and Bruce Lee.//

So many fails the mind boggles.

//looking at girls but can never talk to them
warhammer figurines//

Pass.

//arguing about batman vs ironman
chess//

Fail.

//telescopes//

Pass.

//living with mum//

Fail.

//Dr Who//

Pass.

//Starwars or Startrek NOT both//

Fail. I like both, and Stargate to boot.

Only one poster - david f - achieved almost all passes, and his passes were particularly impressive. Either david f is cheating, or he can read minds.

Thank you for your participation: it has been enlightening. I now know that the only person around these parts who might actually be able to read minds is david f. The next time somebody around here claims to know what [insert minority group here] like, I will be able to point out that most people can't even figure out what nerds like, with reference to this thread.

Dear Toni,

Ah, but there are all kinds of nerds,
all kinds of categories. And there are
cross-overs in their personalities.

Passing or failing some-one is going
with the flow and nerds don't go with
the flow. They are not part of the crowd.

You're not behaving very nerdy. Nerds take
their knowledge about a subject beyond the
surface and dig into the layers beneath.
You're not doing that - which makes me
suspect that you're not a nerd at all.

//which makes me
suspect that you're not a nerd at all.//

Bite my shiny metal arse.

Toni,

So this has been just a ploy to draw us nerds out ?! You're probably on the local pub's indoor soccer tram ?

So cruel !

Dear Toni,

Teeth are not for biting.

Biting is a substitute for the message toddlers
can't yet express in words.

I am not a toddler.
Nor did I ever bite anyone when I was one.
I have never lacked language skills. I don't
need to bite you to express strong feelings
like anger, frustration, joy, et cetera.

However, you do sound angry from your last post
to me - hence I suspect that's the
reason for your suggestion to bite you.
Perhaps you're also feeling some discomfort.
If you were to remove the shiny metal from your arse,
it might help you to lighten up.

//Teeth are not for biting.//

Oh dear. That nice steak I just cooked and I'm going to have to liquefy it and suck it up through a straw.

Dear Toni,

It seems that I should have clarified things
for you. I just took it
for granted that a self-proclaimed nerd such as
yourself would have understood that my earlier
reference to "teeth are
not for biting," referred to "people."
Not brain surgery after-all as it was in response
to your telling me to bite you.

Still, whatever rocks your boat.
Be it wearing shiny metal on your arse or sucking
steak through a straw.
Enjoy!

I thought the original Nerds were Fonzie's entourage in Happy Days, Richie, Pottsy and Ralph Malph, the good kids who ate all their veggies and did their homework.
The 1980's Nerd was just another Hollywood avatar for Jewish ressentiment as he's always playing alongside his nemesis and slave master the "Jock", it's right out of "On The Genealogy Of Morality".

Dear Toni Lavis,

Bible study the way I understand it takes a short piece from the Bible out of context and then makes it` conform to whatever the sect of the person conducting the study maintains is truth.

From Wikipedia 14 June 2015
A nerd in the field of stereotypes of popular culture , is a person who is lonely passionate and obsessed with intellectual matters related to sciences (including mathematics, physics and logic) and technical , or generally any intellectual subject to which most people pay little attention.

Appeared in the late 1950s to the United States , the term has become rather pejorative, unlike geek . Indeed, compared to a geek , a nerd is more antisocial and more polarized over its interests, to which he devoted more time

One can gain great joy from being a nerd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_theory

http://www.math.brown.edu/~jhs/frintch1ch6.pdf

The above urls are articles on number theory. A real nerd would get great joy from the subject. If it appeals to you, you have nerd potential.

David, if this link turns you on, your nerd potential is surreal...

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/sn.html

And we also like words as well as numbers:

http://irenebrination.typepad.com/files/calvino-italo-cosmicomics.pdf

A marvellous little book that one. Probably best enjoyed as a book and not a pdf file.

David f, proper bible study does look at the context. And if the objective is to make it conform to whatever the sect of the person conducting the study maintains is truth, will nerds really comply? I'd expect them to be willing to dissent.

I think whether nerds like bible study depends primarily on whether they're Christian nerds (in which case they will), atheist nerds (in which case they probably won't), agnostic nerds or something else.

Anyway, thanks for the number theory link.

Dear Aidan,

Unfortunately the reality is that what you call proper Bible study is not what is generally Bible study.

Dear Craig and Toni,

Thank you. I have three of Knuth's books and am delighted to hear about surreal numbers.

http://www.penguin.com/read/book-clubs/the-mathematicians-shiva/9780143126317 is a novel based on the death of a woman who may have discovered the solution to the Navier-Stokes equation and the attempts of those who have descended on the area after her death trying to find out about it. Funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s tells about Paul Erdos who devoted his life to mathematics: “His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems",[15] and Erdos drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdos,[16] but Erdos himself ascribed it to Rényi.[17]) After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[18] Erdos won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence, mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.”

I had dinner one night with him and others, and he amused us by pronouncing the menu items as though the words were Hungarian.

When my oldest son was six he said, "Daddy, no matter how high I count there is always a bigger number. Is there a biggest number." I had hish hopes for, but he became a professor of anthropology.

Books with mathematical problems:

Recreations in the Theory of Numbers – The Queen of Mathematics entertains by Albert Beiler. A Dover book and possibly out of publication. George Polya’s 2 volumes “Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning” has problems in many areas of mathematics.
Minds that can bring seminal ideas to mathematics are rare, but I’m sure many people on olo can read and enjoy the above along with doing some of the problems. Mathematics is often taught as though numeration is all there is to it. Mathematics is joyous, non-polluting, cheap and makes nobody pregnant

David, thank you for those links. Erdos is one of my own favourite characters in science and mathematics, although unlike you I was never fortunate enough to meet him. What is your Erdos number? Presumably if you were close enough to him to have had dinner together then it must be 1, or at least 2?

I must try his recipe for stimulating creative thought...

I'll look up your links with pleasure once my exams are over for the semester. Funnily enough, one of my topics this semester has been fluid mechanics, which is of course the domain of Navier-Stokes work, although Stokes extended the work far more generally to include work within vector fields of all kinds.

On the subject of viscous fluids, you might enjoy this story on some work that's being done to finally narrow down one of the oldest undefined physical constants in science - the Reynold's number at which flow transitions from laminar to turbulent - and is also opening up a lot of new questions.

http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/to-predict-turbulence-just-count-the-puffs-rp

david f, thinking about it a bit more, your earlier description of bible study sounds like what the JWs do. Were they involved with your experience of it?

And if not, what prevented you from dissenting?

Dear Aidan,

My wife is not a JW. She told me that in her Protestant Sunday School they were told to pick a Bible verse at random and memorise it for homework. It didn't matter what it was. In that method it was taken out of context and not discussed. It is not unique to Protestantism or to Christianity. Some Jewish schools have their students learn the Jewish Bible by rote. Madrassas have their student memorise the Koran. Scripture can be studied in a methodical purposeful way, but that is usually the way it is done. When it is studied in a methodical purposeful way students may become aware that is basically nonsense and leave the faith.

Virgin birth, trinity, Nirvana, dietary laws, supernatural beings etc. are all nonsense which do not stand up to logical analysis.

Nothing prevents me from dissenting. I find the history and beliefs of religion fascinating but recognise it is basically superstition. Many thoughtful people simply abandon it. It don't think it will ever disappear as it fulfills a need for the gullible and a sense of community for those who would otherwise be rootless.

Dear Craig,

I have no Erdos number. My dinner with Erdos was when I was a student at Syracuse University.

My mathematical work has been all in applied math. Computer design, computer algorithms, Fourier transform development, linear and dynamic programming, computer displays, medical applications. I am 89 retired 27 years ago and have not kept up with the field.

When the article you referred to mentioned the difficulty of a computer simulation the implicit meaning was that it referred to a digital computer. The pipe itself through which one sends the fluid can be regarded as an analog computer. A transparent pipe and photographs of the birth and death of the puffs should provide the data for computation of the Reynolds number.

You're quite right, David, that is the gist of Hof's work, but it's also true that defining the transition point has been an elusive problem for a very long time.

In undergrad fluid mech laminar flow is defined very vaguely as being below Re 2000, with the transitional range as high as Re 5000 in some texts. Hof, by narrowing it down to ~2040 and redefining turbulence effectively in terms of propagation of "puffs", has done something very important, that I suspect will have very significant implications for flux generally, not just fluid velocity fields, in the same way as Stokes' work did.