It's all geek to me

NET RESULTS:LAST WEEK, an indignant letter writer to this paper took issue with a leader that called for science to "divest itself of its geeky image" to attract more students to science degrees, writes Karlin Lillington

"Has it never occurred to the powers that be that what we should be doing is encouraging people to revel in their geekiness?" argued letter writer Daniel Sullivan.

"Continuing to paint those working in the broad science-based fields as some sort of impediment to its growth feeds the bias that already exists. We should encourage children to release their inner geek. We'd all be the better for it."

Hip hip hooray to that!

Some of my favourite people are geeks. Most of the boys I hung out with in high school were geeks, complete with thick glasses, excellent grades and a tendency to stay up all night listening to metal, drinking cans of Coke and playing Risk or Dungeons and Dragons, in the era before the video game.

It drove my mother crazy that I didn't fancy the athletic jocks, but to me preferring the company of geeks was a no-brainer.

Or more appropriately, an all-brainer.

They oozed intelligence, they were wickedly funny and had a quirky sense of humour often based around the most hideous puns ("I have never understood why the pun is termed the lowest form of humour," one of them told me when we were in school, and he's right - it takes a lot of wit to come up with a good pun).

They appreciated the fact that I did pretty well in school, liked a lot of the same books, classes, art, conversational subjects and music, and I loved that I wasn't expected to act like a fluffbrain to fit in, as was often the case with the popular kids.

And finally, they had a well-honed finesse at executing pranks that kept me laughing through school.

Now, anyone who knows and appreciates geeks knows there is a subset that tend to be merry pranksters. The founders of Apple, the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak), were famed pranksters from high school onwards. Wozniak's autobiography iWoz is in large part a homage to the clever prank.

The history books of science and computing are full of pranks, too. Pranks are only one, lively part of geek culture though.

Yes, don't (or rather, do!) laugh: geek culture. For those that haven't checked the business section of a newspaper in a while, geeks have long since gone past the time when being a geek was embarrassing. The turn came, oh, around the time that the geeks were getting millions in sexy venture capital, while you did your same old nine-to-five in a dull office.

There are whole websites dedicated to it: geekculture.com - but of course - geekpride.com, geek.com and geekchic.com.

One of my favourite sites, thinkgeek.com, sells excellent T-shirts, that essential geekwear item. There are now so many available that they've had to divide them into subsections that include "generic geek", "frustrations", "gaming", "IT department" and "science and maths".

And ladies, "geek chicks rock", as they say, although admittedly they are still a smaller overall population than guy geeks. I love the brown T-shirt with the representation of the chocolate molecule (theobromine, to be exact), the "slide to unlock" iPhone reference T-shirt (fnar fnar!) and the panties with "I'm blogging this" printed on the front.

According to Wikipedia.com, "geek" at one time "referred to a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs".

Who knew? I also didn't know that Spain celebrates an annual nerd day on May 25th. Why May 25th? Because that is the day on which the first Star Wars film premiered in 1977. Sheesh, that is seriously geeky.

Geekdom is a broad church now, however, and isn't all Star Wars fans. Rather tellingly, geekdom these days flows over into finance - hence the packet of venture capitalist notecards and stickers available from Moo.com. "Your mother is not a valid test market", and "No, not even PowerPoint can save you now" are amongst the designs.

I recognise that if you haven't laughed once yet, you probably have no inner geek to release and thus may not understand the letter writer's annoyance.

Nor will it make sense that I wholeheartedly agree that the way to get kids interested in science and technology is to show how much darn fun and interesting it is to be a geek and study geeky things, as opposed to pretending like they really aren't geeky at all.

So embrace nerddom. Release your inner geek, and have a great time studying some wonderful subjects.

Blog:www.techno-culture.com