Come and fess up to the ways in which you are really square/bit of a nerd

[baubleybobbityhat]

I love a nice big jigsaw, me. Preferably something like a thatched cottage surrounded by flowers.

I am too embarrassed to do them at home because my 80 year old mother and inlaws who are in their 70s share my enthusiasm and I just think if any of my uber-cool London creative/media-type mates came calling and saw a bugger like that on my dining table they would think I was a very sad case and immediately drop me.

Are they all the same, Avocado? All the cubes, I mean.

Wish I could solve the rubiks cube. (would-be-geek)

Mind you, I watch Countryfile.
Am very particular about grammar and spelling.
Love jigsaws, but can't get them out with all these small children around, so endlessly try to engage them in theirs instead. :o
I want to go to a party with the person up-thread who does Gauss-Jordan elimination in her head. So I can ask what Gauss-Jordan elimination IS.

Geek or would-be geek? Not sure...

We could certainly throw in plenty of Blackadder inmysparetime.

Anyone for Anne of Green Gables? I have the additional two books after Anne of Ingleside - Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside. Not as good as original Anne but score some geek points.

No, the cubes are not all the same. And that's the exciting thing. The different designs on the cubes make them different mathematically in terms of number of permutations and solving etc.

I can also tell you the 11th digit of any ISBN if you tell me the first 10 (drunk party trick I haven't done er, more than once).

Friends, I think we have found ourselves a geek clique :o :o :o

Stationery....I could sit and play with it all day. I had a pretend stationery shop as a child with cut up pieces of wallpaper, shop bags etc as writing paper and never grew out of it.

Weird geeky Japanese stationery and weird geeky Japanese packaged products. Can be anything inside-just like to display the graphic design.

I collect those squidgy silicon spoons and cooking utensils and go ballistic if anybody uses them. My grown children's favourite 'game' is to use them without me seeing them take them out of the jar then wave them about in my face, covered in stirred bits of food. I can't stand it........

Oh, and the complete 'The Waltons', 'Little Town On The Prairie' and an old video of the 'What Katy Did' dramatisation. All mine, all watched obsessively together with my 5 'Laura Ingalls Wilder' biographies, tourist guides, pull over pinnies I made for my daughter and one child named after a character......

Oooh! Maps! I love maps. There is something very satisfying about plotting your own map.

Not done it in ages though. The last one was a geological map of a fault line in sedimentary rock. Oh, and mapping a geological feature to reveal what it was (it was a volcano) it made me feel like a Geology Sherlock.

I have a thing about supersonic aircraft, thanks to DH. We used to go to air shows. My proudest aircraft geek moment was spotting a Stealth passing soundlessly over my house. I was very excited, although actually seeing an SR-71 "Blackbird" on the ground came close.

A hobby I have when work is slack is to find a song on Youtube and listen to every properly-recorded cover version of it I can find. I then rank them in order of preference.

OMG thesmallclanger-

Think i have a girl crush on you. That cover version ranking is super-geek.

A good one to start with is "Angel of the Morning". There are versions of that to suit all tastes .

I love maps too!

And jigsaw puzzles, have asked for a puzzle globe every Christmas for the last five years to no avail

And I get all the science jokes on the Big Bang. Like Stranded I have my own lab coat.

Spreadsheets are über cool. I also collect books and knit. My friends think I am an archetypical geek. But geek is the new cool.

radiohelen - if you're still on the thread -some of my fortran code is in the Met Office unified model !

And aircraft - I watched that bbc documentary about Rolls Royce engines with rapt amazement - the bit where they "inflate" the kind of metal honeycomb that the turbine blades are made from at high temperature and pressure - wow! .

Love it smallclanger. i have a new way to pass my time. Because I have so much of it..

Would love to find covers of 'Joy to the world' by Three Dog Night. Love that song but feel that it has potential to be so much more...

I was the founder member of our school's maths club. Actually I was the only member and I used to get extra maths homework and view it as a treat. I still remember the pleasure I got from being stuck in my bedroom working out the answer to a particular puzzle (which was something like, "what's the smallest number which, written forwards, is exactly two times the same number written backwards". I couldn't do it now but I spent a long time working out the formula to solve it and it was a punch the air moment. I could have been at the disco with my friends but I was much happier being a nerd. .

I really enjoy Antiques Roadshow and I sometimes buy antiques magazines.

When I was in Australia my cousin and I used to hire jigsaws from the library, the whole flat ended up doing bits of it much to my annoyance it was fun!
I have been known to stay up until the wee hours as I will not be defeated by too much sky and the tackier the jigsaw the better in my opinion.

I also love a good look through a detailed atlas

Geek Clique

The last time I was in Paris I went mad in Monoprix and came home with 16 French school cahiers-the tall, narrow kind with squared pages for math only I would use them for writing. That's if I could bear to besmirch their pristine check.

I have them arranged on my desk, in sets of four as they came in four different colours, see? I look at them lovingly after a hard day.

I love jigaws! Can't wait to start the one DH got me for xmas. They have to be Ravensberger though.

Outdoor clothing shops make my heart race. All those lovely technical fabrics to stroke......

I am a bioinformatician by profession. Do I win?

I love this thread.

Geek clique - do you think we could manage a whole string of these chat threads, only instead of numbering them 1,2, 3, maybe we could do primes?

Also, anyone interested in favourite equations? Mine would be the Lorentz covariant forms of Maxwell's equations and the field equations for general relativity.

Oh and to top off my posts, I'm loving the ITV2 re-runs of 'Beauty And The Geek'. Loved it the first time, the second time....the third....That show has heart....And geeks.

StrandedBear I too own a lab coat :o
I cobbled together built my own pc with ubuntu on it,it was awsome :o
( have a mac now cos Dh took pity on me,I couldnt find drivers for video,then lost interest )
Im not into mechanical/physics or maths though, its molecular diagnostics here
Oh yeah and I have open office on my mac
I dont have to mental energy to be a nerd now

I'm a philosophy teacher, and my husband says I'm a bit pedantic of a philosophy geek... as I just naturally pick up on arguments, say a philosophy quote or something to that effect.

I disagreed with him - until a couple of weeks ago when my 8 year old corrected me and told me off for using a Tu Quoque argument in the car! . Hmm, he may have a point .