Geek Of The Week 09.2012: Kaylee Frye

Why?

Because she’s so darn cute in those coveralls.  And who doesn’t want to be a spaceship grease monkey?  Competency is captivating.  Aptitude is attractive.  Skills are sexy.  Plus, she’s self-taught.  You’ve got to  love a girl so into her geek thing that formal schooling would only slow her down.

Nerdy inability to get dressed up in clothes that do not burn the retina? Check. Still cute? Check.

And it doesn’t hurt that she’s a character on the show every nerd has been obsessed with since five seconds after it got cancelled by the dastardly villains at Fox.  If you aren’t aware, it is now officially time for us to shut up about Firefly.  I almost got beat up by a normal the last time I brought it up.  Then there was at least fifteen minutes of:  “God, I wish you people would shut UP about Firefly. blahblah,etc”  I wasn’t listening, but it really interfered with my space cowgirl daydream time.

But the real reason that Kaylee is a well-written fictional nerd is that, despite her obvious geekiness and somewhat overly direct method of communication, she’s usually cheerful and totally in touch with her physical side.  So many times, people who value and aspire to intellectual pursuits are depicted in fiction as physically inept, grouchy and sexless.  They are the whiny nerdy weakling, the awkward never-touched-a-ball dork, or the cranky poorly-dressed girl who wouldn’t know how to find her erogenous zones  with a map and a mirror.  This is manifestly not the case and kudos to Jewel Staite for playing Kaylee in such a refreshing manner and a big round of applause to Joss Whedon and his crew for writing such a great character.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: 500 years in the future (or 2002, depending on the way you think about these things)

Turn-Ons: Strawberries, spaceship  engines, ruffles, synchronizers

Turn-Offs: Guns, grouchiness

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 08.2012: Dr. Eric Poeschla

He made trippy cats to cure AIDS!

Why?

Nightlight cats want to know where da rave ats.

Just when you think those guys at the Mayo clinic are only resting on their well-educated rumps, using what is left of the medical grant money in America to buy themselves another Porsche, along comes Dr. Eric Poeschla.  First of all, he and his team have come up with some very promising paths in AIDS research and then he went and made glow-in-the-darks cats.  That’s just cool.

And having an actual justifiable scientific reason for inventing a nightlight cat?  For the win!  Those wacky California  medical researchers.  Now, if he can just come up with one of those Star Trek tricorder things Bones was always using…

Stats:

Started the sexy on: Who cares?  Dude made glow-in-the-dark kitteh!  He can haz cheeseburger!

Turn-Ons: Infectious diseases, gene therapy, curing AIDS

Turn-Offs: Stem cell research bans, reduced research budgets, PETA

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 07.2012: Tim Westergren

Music For The Masses, Brought To You By Math and Tim Westergen

Why?

Pandora - you hear what you want to hear

In 1999, this man had over twenty years of experience in the music industry.  He wanted the world to have easier access to music like the music they like.   To that end, Tim Westergen and some buddies created the Music Genome Project, a database of music that translates each song into a vector with four hundred attributes.  They then use what we believe to be (proprietary) machine learning algorithms to create a relational database of music.  Pandora is the slickly designed user interface for that database, allowing users to quickly and easily create personalized radio stations that feed the user a continuous stream of music based on their rating it thumbs up or down.

Using math to find you new music to love?  That’s good nerdiness right there.  Plus, most nerds neglect the user interface.  Not so at Pandora where you can painlessly listen to music you’d never have time to find or ever hear on the radio, then download the cds or find local concert dates.  Without them, I’d never know I have a thing for Tom Waits.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: December 21, 1965

Turn-Ons: Rocking out, sharing songs, promoting new musicians, quantifying what exactly is so awesome the Tron soundtrack

Turn-Offs: Paying too much for music, The Man telling you what you can hear

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 06.2012: CmdrTaco AKA Rob Malda

Why?

Sitting in front of a Sourceforge sign and behind a Mac. Truly a complicated individual.

He was the founder and, until last year, the Head Nerdo of Slashdot. Their slogan says it all: News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters. This online news site has been thrilling our synaptic connections since 1998, back when the only way to find out about the Internet was by reading the man pages.And we are very sure CmdrTaco knew his way around a man page.

That was back when the Internet was just a BBS with an ego problem, FidoNet hopped up on too much caffeine, a dos application that dreamed of getting in with the Apple crowd, back when ‘apps’ were ‘applications.’ And it was awesome. Sure, it’s way cooler now, but shut up before my nostalgia smacks you with a cassette player.

Anyway, not only does Slashdot offer science, tech and geeky news in an open-source format but it taps into that primal obsessive-compulsiveness of the nerd world (Gather ye round, oh mini-geeks, and let me tell you the tale of the day I was first post!) by leaving their forums wide open and letting lively, snarky, occasionally troll-infested debate ensue.   It inspires whole new vectors of awesomeness.

Let us all do the happy slashdot dance now. (Imagine people everywhere doing the Muppet dance to the Imperial March while repeating Slashdot until you want to punch the whole world in the face.)

According to his webpage,since leaving Slashdot, Mr.Malda has been using his vast intellect to slob around the house, watching anime and playing D&D. Live the dream, man!

Stats:

Started the sexy on: May 10, 1976

Turn-Ons: Linux, Perl, anime, photography, OMG Ponies!!!

Turn-Offs: flamebait, trolls, Windows, the suggestion that Han did not shoot first

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 05.2012: Padramasee Warrior

Padmasree 'Core Competency' Warrior

Why?

Just one of the many things she's in charge of.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: 1961

Turn-Ons: Collecting Board of Director titles and Women-centric awards like they are Garbage Pail Kids cards.

Turn-Offs: Technology that’s not at least two years ahead of it’s time or connected in some way with the Cloudverse.

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 04.2012: Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the man who'll take us back to the Space Age

Why?

Because he started SpaceX, the company currently favored to make commercial space flight a reality! And Tesla Motors, the company that invented the Tesla Roadster, arguably the first viable production electric car of the modern era! And he’s the primary investor and chairman of SolarCity, a solar energy company that is busy installing electric car recharging stations all over the place.

He also did some other stuff, like form Paypal, but we don’t hold that against him. Everybody makes mistakes. We’re sure he was young and he needed the money.

He's got, like, a dozen of these in his garage. It gets a bazillion miles to the gallon.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: June 28th, 1971

Turn-Ons: Three little letters:I.P.O.

Turn-Offs: Sleeping late, slacking off, gas-guzzling vehicles

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 03.2012: Edna Modes

Fabulously nerdy, darlings!

Why?

Because without a fantastic costume, a super hero is just a mutant freak vigilante. Not only does E, fashion designer to super heroes and poofy-lipped spoiled supermodels alike,  steal the show during

An explosive passion for her work. Amen, sister.

Pixar’s iconic Incredibles, she has better fashion sense than all the other nerds in the universe combined.  Seriously, are those not the best glasses ever?  E has a dry, subdued wit that makes bearable the two-hundredth time the mini-geeks plead to watch The Incredibles.

Edna Modes’ secret basement lair sports two things near and dear to every nerdy cardiac muscle.  First – serious security. She has voice recognition, palm and retinal scanners, and a pop-down gun turret. All just down the hallway from her kitchen. Second – lots of high-tech looking machines that probably involve lasers.  That’s got to be so fulfilling.

The fact that Pixar director, Brad Bird, was the voice actor for E means he will no doubt be a future Geek Of The Week. Especially if he gets off his rump and makes a sequel. I’m sure he’ll be ecstatic to hear that.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: October 27th, 2004 (Incredibles release date)

Turn-Ons: Bold, heroic spandex onesies.  Any sentence that can include the phrase: … can also withstand temperatures of up to one thousand degrees.

Turn-Offs: Hobo suit pajamas. Capes.

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.

Geek Of The Week 02.2012: Bill Gates

The Nerd Poster Boy of the '90s

Why?

One of the classic bad boys of geekdom, Bill Gates inspires many mixed emotions, but you can’t deny his nerd street cred.  This Harvard drop-out became

He REALLY loves his computer.

one of the wealthiest people in the world through ruthless business practices, a certain operating system you may have heard about, and a through understanding of combinatorics.  No matter how many times a Microsoft-based software glitch has made you contemplate bloody violence, you can’t deny that if someone gets to take over the world, you’d prefer that it be a guy who really understands the math.

Also, you have to appreciate a guy who plays to his strengths.  He’s geeky and he knows it.  A self-made billionaire by the time he was 32, he’s an inspiration to nerds everywhere that if you work hard and think harder, you can make buckets of money.  And then you can use that money to do something really cool, like owning the first Fortune 500 company to to provide benefits for the same-sex partners of its employees or funding research aiming to turn human poop into biodiesel, thus opening the world to a whole new vista of My car is a piece of crap humor.

Stats:

Started the sexy on: October 28th, 1955

Turn-Ons: Lakeside palaces with basement swimming pools decked out with underwater music systems.  Forcing entire states to adopt equal benefits to same sex couples.  Curing polio, AIDS and TB.

Turn-Offs: Secure operating systems.  Increased functionality with successive software releases.  Open-source anything.

Do you have a nerd to nominate?

Please email me with relevant street cred, bragging rights, photos, etc.