Weird Nerd and Geek

A nerd or a nerdy person, is described as being intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired, and spend exceeding reasonable limits of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, either highly technical, topics of fiction or fantasy^.  Many nerds are characterized as quirky, shy, have difficulty in socializing and “unattractive” or weird^. There are two types of interests that described as nerdy, they are intellectual in academics, technical activities, science, mathematics and technology. Most nerds have weird hobbies such as, obsessive and immature games like trading game cards, comic books, role-playing games, and film and television programs about fantasy and science fictions. A unique and strange interest can also be nerdy because it associates with the Nerdy people. Most stereotypical nerds are described as intelligent but are “awkward”,  socially and physically, and often perceived that they lack confidence or different from other people, or oblivious to the negative perceptions held of them by others, with the result that they become frequent objects of bullying, scorn, ridicule and social isolation and insecurities. But many nerds sometimes,  find a similar group and associate with them.

1) Nerd / Nerdy

Mark Zuckerberg, Nerdy Facebook co-Founder

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, is an American Internet entrepreneur and a computer programmer. Zuckerberg is one of five co-founders of the Facebook social networking site, and the chairman and chief executive of Facebook,Inc. He studied computer science and psychology in Harvard University, and during his sophomore year, he wrote a program which he called Facemash, as a “fun” project, allowing students on the college’s network vote on other students’ attractiveness photo. However, few days after it was published, it was shut down, but would become a template for his writing Facebook, a program he launched from his dormitory room. Zuckerberg brought Facebook to other campuses, with the help of his friends,  nationwide and soon after moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2007, Zuckerberg was a billionaire at the age of 23, and Facebook had 500 million users estimated by 2010. Zuckerberg has since been involved in various legal disputes initiated by others who have claimed a share of the company’s profits due to their help in setting it up. Zuckerberg sees blue as dominant color for Facebook, because he is red-green colorblind. Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, a fellow student who he began dating in 2003. Priscilla Chan is the child of a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee, who came to United States after the Fall of Saigon. Zuckerberg and Chan got married on May 19, 2012, in Zuckerberg’s backyard in a celebration also marking her graduation from medical school.

Bill Gates, Nerdy Billionaire

William Henry “Bill” Gates III born October 28, 1955 is an American philanthropist and business magnate, and the former chief executive and current Microsoft chairman, the largest personal-computer software company in the world, with co-founder Paul Allen. Bill Gates is consistently ranked among the world’s wealthiest people. The rise of the computer industry has allowed many “nerdy” people one most notably is Bill Gates to accumulate large fortunes.

Paul Allen, co-Founder of Microsoft

Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American investor and philanthropist, and co-founder of Microsoft Corporation along with a leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications, the famous Bill Gates. Paul Allen is also the 48th richest person in the world and the founder and chairman of  Vulcan Inc. (a project management and investment company founded by Paul Allen in 1986, Microsoft co-founder), to manage his investments, which manages his business and philanthropic efforts. Allen also has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio which includes technology companies, real estate holdings, and stakes in other technology, media, and content companies.

Bryan Caplan,

Bryan Caplan (born April 8, 1971) is an American Professor of Economics at George Mason University, an economist, a “blogger‘ for EconLog, Cato Institute adjunct scholar, and Mercantus Center Research Fellow. He is best known for his Libertarian ideology in public choice theory.

Vlogbrothers

The Vlogbrothers is a “vloggers” video bloggers, a broadcast series on YouTube, and this Internet-based show hosted and created by brothers, John Green and Hank Green, utilizing a registered YouTube channel that allows viewers to become subscribers. The first “birth” of online broadcasting was the “Brotherhood 2.0″ project, preceding the establishment of the Green brother’s regular “vlogging” activity through the Vlogbrothers channel. The Greens state that their vlog has no steadfast format, “Really, it’s not about anything in particular. Whether we’re talking about our lives, making each other laugh, or trying to get something more important across, people seem to enjoy it”.  Crash Course is an educational channel that launched preview on December 2,2011, by Hank and John Green, which is funded by YouTube’s $100 million dollar original channel initiative. Hank Green teaches Biology and and John Green teaches World History, and commonly referred to themselves as “nerds” and their famous YouTube account vlogbrothers with their persona nerdy appeal. “Nerdfighters” or Nerdfighteria  is yhe ame that their fans have adapted reflecting the “nerdy subculture popularity”.

2)  Asperger Syndrome

Asperger’s syndrome is a high-function form of autism, and children with the disorder can be highly intelligent, they can also have immature or inappropriate responses to social situations. Nerdy is sometimes compared to medical disorders such as, Obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, such as showing extreme interest in rules, due to the low muscle tone and communication problems called dysfunction in sensory integration, and Asperger syndrome due to the tendency of engaging in intense, specific, obscure, or intellectual interests and experiencing difficulty in social situations.

3) Autism

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior, like showing too much interests in rules, and due to the low-muscle tone and communication problem that causes dysfunction in sensory integration and Asperger syndrome due to intense engaging, specific, obscure, or intellectual interests and experiencing difficult social situations.

4) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

 

Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts resulting to fear,uneasiness, apprehension, or worry, by showing repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing the associated anxiety, or by a combination of such compulsions and obsessions. Symptoms of the disorder include excessive repeated washing or cleaning, extreme hoarding or excessive collection of items, along with the inability to discard them, preoccupation with sexual behavior, religious or violent thoughts, related-relationship obsessions, aversion to particular numbers and nervous behavioral, such as repeated opening and closing of door number of times before entering or leaving a room.

 Jaleel White as Steve Urkel

 5) Geek

The word geek   a derogatory slang term for an intellectual but socially-impaired person who spends time on undesirable pursuits, or a term for odd or non-mainstream people, with different idea or meaning that ranged from “a computer expert or enthusiast” to “a person interested in unique, strange or weird hobby”, with a general disparaging meaning of “a peculiar or disliked person, especially a person who is perceived to be intellectual and genius. “Geek chic” is referred to as “stereotypically geek” characterized as person with black-rimmed big glasses, T-shirts with geek in jokes, and more on technical accessories complex. The geek person, the term is used for “claiming the geek identity as something not only meaningful, but also stylish purposes.”Many NBA players wear lensless glasses with thick horn-rimmed glasses plastic frames  during interviews,  and the geek chic draw comparison to Steve Urkel, fictional character of the ABC-CBS Family Matters sitcom played by Jaleel White, as a representative or perfect example of a class or type  of a nerd and geek, with big and thick eyeglasses, a “high-flood water pants” held up by suspenders, cardigan multi-colored sweaters with high-pitched funny voice.

 Geek Girl

Jade Raymond

Jade Raymond born August 28,1975, in Montreal, Canada is an executive for Canadian video game and Ubisoft Toronto Managing Director. Her first post-university job was as a programmer for Sony, where she helped in the creating Sony Online‘s first Research and Development group, leading Raymond to Electronic Arts and worked as a producer on The Sims Online. Jade Raymond started working for Ubisoft Montreal in 2004, and was appointed as the Assassin’s Creed producer.

Geek Girl, Marissa Mayer

Marissa Ann Mayer is an American business executive, born May 30, 1975, and currently the President and CEO of Yahoo! Mayer was a long-time Google executive and key spokesperson. Mayer held variant key roles in Google Product Search, Google search, Google Toolbar, Gmail, iGoogle, Google News, Google images, Google Maps and Google Books. Marissa Mayer joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20, and was the first female engineer, designer, product manager and executive for 13 years. Mayer also oversaw the simple unattractive layout of Google search homepage. she became the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, and Vice President of Local, Maps and Location Services. Mayer is the youngest Fortune 500 company CEO,and ranked number 14 on America’s most powerful businesswoman by the Fortune Magazine in 2012. Mayer was appointed President and CEO of Yahoo!, on July 16, 2012, effective the following day. She is also a member of the company’s board of directors.

Geek Girl, Lea Culver

Lea Culver, born on November 5,1982, is a computer science graduate of the University of Minnesota and a computer programmer. Lea Culver is the co-founder of Pownce, a micro-blogging and free social networking site in 2007, acquired by Six Apart (a software company famous for creating TypePad blog hosting service, Movable type blogware, and Vox in December 2008 and was named among the Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 in November 2008 by the Fast Company Magazine. In February 2010, Lea Culver left Six Apart. 

Geek Girl, Limor Fried

Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, is an American electrical engineer, owner of the electronics hobbyist company, Adafruit Industries. Limor Fried, is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the Open Source Hardware definition drafting. Fried was awarded the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2009 . Fried was awarded the Most Influential Women in Technology awarded by Fast Company in 2011.

Geek Girl, Natali Del Conte-Morris

Natali Terese Del Conte-Morris, (born August 28, 1978, in San Leandro, California) is a technology news journalist and online media personality, a former CNET.com editor and a former co-host of the Buzz Out Loud technology news podcast, one of CNET.com’s flagship podcasts, and a daily technology news show, the Loaded which was reformatted in Spanish and shown on Univision television network in Spanish Language.

Geek Girl Felicia Day

Kathryn Felicia Day (born June 28, 1979) is an American actress and writer. Known as Felicia Day, noted for her work as “Vi” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Felicia Day is the creator, writer, and star of a wen series, The Guild, which started airing its sixth season in October 2012.

6)  Hacker / Cracker

Kevin David Mitnick (born on August 6, 1963) is an American computer security consultant, author, convicted criminal, and white hat hacker. Kevin Mitnick was convicted of various computer and communications-related crimes, and during his arrest, he was the most-wanted computer criminal in the United States.

Adrian Lamo is a Colombian-American threat analyst and grey hat hacker. Adrian Lamo, became ‘famous’ and gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, that includes Microsoft, Yahoo! and The New York Times, reaching the highest point during his arrest in 2003. In 2010, Lamo became involved in contention in the Wikileaks scandal involving Bradley Manning, who was arrested after Lamo reported to federal authorities that Manning had “leaked” numerous sensitive U.S. government documents. Adrian Lamo first became known for operating AOL watchdog site Inside-AOL.com.

Kevin Lee Poulsen (born 1965 in Pasadena, California), is an American former black hat hacker and current Wired.com News Editor. When the FBI started manhunt for Kevin Poulsen, he went underground as a fugitive. When he was featured on Unsolved Mysteries on NBC’s, the show’s 1-800 telephone lines crashed mysteriously. However, Poulsen was finally arrested in April 1991, then pleaded guilty in June 1994 to seven counts of wire, mail, computer fraud, money laundering and obstruction of Justice, and breaking into computers and obtained undercover businesses information run by the FBI, and was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $56,000 in restitution, which during that time, it was the longest sentence ever given for cracking. After Poulsen’s release, he has reinvented himself as a “journalist”.  In October 2006, Poulsen released information detailing his successful search for registered sex offenders using MySpace soliciting sex from children. His work identified 744 registered people with MySpace profiles, and led to the arrest of one, Andrew Lubrano. Kevin Poulsen broke the initial story of Bradley Manning‘s  arrest and published the logs of  Manning’s incriminating chats with Adrian Lamo. 

Bradley Edward Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed to whistleblower WikiLeaks website “classified confidential materials“. He was charged over the following months with a capital offense and number of offenses, including communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. Manning was assigned to a U.S. Army unit based near Baghdad, and made an access to databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. Manning was arrested after a chat with Adrian Lamo , a computer hacker, who rvealed to the FBI, that Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from these databases and passed it to WikiLeaks.

Hacker means someone who finds weaknesses in a computer or computer network, though the term can also refer to someone with an advanced understanding of computers and computer networks, and reclaimed by computer programmers as hacker or better called a cracker.

7)  Weird

Weird is an adjectives referring to what is of a strange mysteriously or peculiar, unusual, odd, supernatural or preternatural influences usually frightening or scary nature.

8)  Genius

A genius is someone representing exceptional intellectual ability, creativity and originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement never before known insight. This genius term is used in numerous ways, referring to a particular aspect of an individual, or the entire individual, to a scholar in many subjects, for example, Isaac Newton or Leonardo da Vinci, or scholar in single subject, for example Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. Research into what causes genius and mastery is still in its early stages, and psychology offers relevant insights.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath, painter, architect, musician, scientist, sculptor, mathematician, engineer, inventor, geologist, anatomist, botanist, cartographer, and writer. Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 , and died on May 2, 1519, Old Style calendar. He was an exceptional genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727 Old Style) or New Style, January 4, 1643 – March 31, 1727]was an English mathematician, astronomer, physicist, alchemist, natural philosopher and theologian, “considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived. The Newton’s theory of color that the colored light does not change its properties by separating out a colored beam and shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, and remained the same color. Newton, observed that color is the result of objects interacting with ready-colored light rather than objects generating the color themselves.

9)  Savant Syndrome

Laurence Kim Peek an American savant who was born on November 11, 1951, and died of heart attack on December 19, 2009 at the age of 58. Peek was known as a “megasavant“, and have an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital abnormality of the brain. He was the inspiration for the character of Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in the Rain Man film. Unlike Babbitt, who had autism, Peek probably had FG syndrome also called FGS, also known as Opitz-Kaveggia syndrome, is a rare genetic syndrome linked to the X-chromosome that causes physical anomalies and delay on developmental.

Temple Grandin is an American doctor of animal science, and Colorado State University professor,(born August 29, 1947). Grandin is a savant bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. Temple Grandin, as a person with high-functioning autism, is also noted for her work in autism advocacy and is the inventor of the squeeze machine or hug machine, usually individuals with autism spectrum disorders and designed to calm hypersensitive people.

Stephen Wiltshire MBE, Hon. FSAI. was born on April 24,1974, is a British architectural artist who has been diagnosed with autism, and a savant, known for his ability to draw from his memory a landscape after seeing it just once. His work has gained popularity worldwide.

Matthew “Matt” Savage is an American autistic savant musician, born in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1992. Matt was a precocious infant who walked early and learned to read at the age of 18 months. Savage was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism, at age three. Matt hates any noises or music during his early childhood.

Daniel Tammet is a British writer and autistic savant, with high-functioning autism and savant syndrome, (born on 31 January 1979). Tammet has reportedly learned 10 languages which he learned in a TV documentary in just a week, including Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh, and Icelandic.The authors speculated that Tammet’s savant memory could be a result of synaesthesia (neurological condition in which one sensory stimulation or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway) combined with Asperger syndrome, or it could be the result of mnemonic strategies.

10)  Child prodigy

A child prodigy is someone who develops extra ordinary skills, at an early age at a level far beyond the normal age of a child.  A prodigy has to be a child, or at least younger than 18 years, who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field to exert oneself to do.

Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen is a child prodigy in chess, a Norwegian chess Grandmaster, (born 30 November 1990),who is currently the number-one ranked player in the world. In January 2010 he became the seventh player in history to be ranked number one in the world on the FIDE official rating list.  On 26 April 2004 Carlsen became a Grandmaster  at the age of 13 years, and 148 days, making him the third-youngest child prodigy Grandmaster in history.

Terence “Terry” Chi-Shen Tao (born 17 July 1975, Adelaide), is a child prodigy in mathematics, an Australian mathematician working in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, additive combinatorics, ergodic theory, random matrix theory and analytic number theory. Terry Tao,  currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the recipients of Fields Medal of 2006. Tao received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at age 16, from Flinders University, and receiving his Ph.D. at age 20.