I’m such a nerd.
So today at work, we took a colleague out for lunch on his last day. He’s leaving the contractor world to become a civil servant. PB is a hard-working thermal analyst; hell, he was in the office on Sunday when I was. If I was in my last week of work, I … wouldn’t be in on the weekend. But there he was. When we talked about how life as a civil servant would be different, I said, “Hey, man, you’re gonna have to get some hobbies or something.”
At lunch, we talked about a variety of weird subjects—after all, this was a table full of nerdy engineers. But I think I out-nerded them all. The subject of earthquakes came up [in the context of a what-to-do-in-an-earthquake discussion about some safety slides that NASA/MSFC had circulated, because we're in such a dangerous zone here in Alabama 
], and someone talked about the New Madrid earthquake. I then brought up Kentucky Bend, and then …
“How the hell do you know this stuff?”
“I read Wikipedia late at night when I can’t sleep.”
“And you tell me that I need a hobby?”
Heh. I come by it honestly. Dad used to read the encyclopedia as a kid. [So did I.]
Of course, you mentioning the Kentucky Bend made me curious and now I have spent too much time reading Wikipedia this morning…
May 24th, 2008 at 08:40Um, Geof, I do the same thing. If I’m bored, if I can’t sleep, if I have some free time that otherwise wouldn’t be filled with anything interesting… off to Wikipedia I go.
I used to read the encyclopaedias when I was kid too. My parents never did. Maybe I started something for this gene pool.
May 24th, 2008 at 09:23Gosh, somebody else did that, too? Obviously we didn’t have Wikipedia when I was a kid, but when I woke up before everyone else in the mornings I would pick a volume at random and read through the World Book encyclopedia.
Random anecdote: I must’ve been about 10 when I was playing Trivial Pursuit with a (in retrospect, quite patient) parent of one of my friends. That parent was quite surprised when I knew the answer to a particular question was Malcolm X.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:38Apparently, my friends are nerds, too.
No, this really doesn’t surprise me.
May 24th, 2008 at 21:07