How nerdy are you?This week Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died. A whole generation of pasty dice-obsessed nerds owes him big time. Me included.
So, in his honour, how nerdy were you? Are you still sunlight-averse? What are the sad little things you do that nobody else understands?
As an example, a B3ta regular who shall remain nameless told us, "I spent an entire school summer holiday getting my BBC Model B computer to produce filthy stories from an extensive database of names, nouns, adjectives, stock phrases and deviant sexual practices. It revolutionised the porn magazine dirty letter writing industry for ever.
Revel in your own nerdiness.
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chthonic, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 10:32)
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The word "Nerd" seemsto come from a 1950's book, If I ran the Zoo, by Dr. Theodore Seuss Geisel in which one of the characters is called a Nerd. Also probably an alteration of 1940s slang nert "stupid or crazy person," itself an alteration of nut.
I was led to believe the term was an anagram for "Not Equipped for Rigid Disipline." That one told to me by a mercenary from the jungles of El Salvador.
Anyway, in a Skypecast about "String theory and God" several weeks ago, I got into an argument about the use of the word Theory. I said he misused it, he called me a high school dropout.
Bastard.
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CapnChkn I would rather be flying elephants., Sun 9 Mar 2008, 15:35,
5 replies)
Yay!String theory is my most favorite thing in the world that I don't understand.
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girlinthehole, Sun 9 Mar 2008, 17:03,
closed)
Mega apologies for being so pedanticBut is it not an "acronym"? I think an example of an anagram would be "flowery twats" = Fawlty Towers..
(Trust me to pluck out a rude example.)
*just exposed extent of own nerdiness*
Fuck, sorry, I'll be taking my red pen to the screen next....
As for the string theory - that sounds juicy! All I know about string is that The Clangers ate blue string soup, and Spike Milligan's poem about string is one of my all time favourites...
"String is a very important thing
Rope is thicker
But string is quicker"
p.s. Love learning the origin of words and I definitely fit into the nert / nut category.
And your argument about the misuse of "theory" - would that be because "Theos" means "God" in Greek, hence theology etc. therefore....
Just looked up "string theory" on t'interweb...
Shoot me with shit for correcting "anagram" - you are clever and I am thick...
Aw, feck it. I'll get back into my kitchen, where I belong...
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Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Sun 9 Mar 2008, 20:00,
closed)
?In this case it should be acronym. Or really "backronym", where words are found later to fit. Like that "Port Out, Starboard Home" bollocks.
And was the argument regarding whether it should be String Hypothesis rather than theory? *gets anorak*
(, Sun 9 Mar 2008, 20:51, closed)
string theoryIt is a theory. It's a lot of maths, which is nicely provable in the maths world.
That it actually relates to the real world is a hypothesis.
I'm also fairly convinced that it doesn't describe the real world at all. Unfortunately its makeup is such that it can't be disproved. Even when they made a prediction which turned out to be wrong by something like 100 orders of magnitude (ie a *LOT*), they fiddled about so it matched again. That's not physics!!!! Gah!
(if anyone's wondering, no my branch of physics is completely unrelated. But my boyfriend is doing his PhD in spin foam models for quantum gravity. This is a major competitor for string theory)
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catness, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 11:23,
closed)
"they fiddled about so it matched again."But that is physics. Old joke about a physicist proving all odd numbers are prime: "3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is experimental error, 11 is a prime..."
(, Wed 12 Mar 2008, 22:49, closed)
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