Ha. At my former employer with (geek/nerd)s, adults played with them!

Makes me want to try this out and then pick up the bubble. So cool to see that it doesn't pop on impact. I guess the cold air makes it more difficult to pop because the outside layer is in the middle of freezing? I'm not a science nerd so I'm just assuming that.

insane, back when I was in highschool there was no cops/guards/etc

We even had a smoking section, and guns could be brought on campus.

For smoking section you just needed a letter from parents that they knew you smoked. and on recess the smokers all hung out there.

To bring gun to school, it was during any hunting season. You had to have note from parents that they know. The gun had to be visible, either gun rack in back window of truck or in passenger seat. Rifles and Shotguns only no pistols.

You had to have your Hunter's Safety Course card, Your Hunting License both on you to give copies at office.

You had to leave your vehicle keys with the front office and submit to random vehicle search of the hunter's vehicles only.

So while everyone could go to their cars at recess, or if you had extra empty elective, some of us juniors would drive up to Hardees before lunch and grab fast food then be back before 4th period started, but the hunters had to leave their keys with front office and they could not retrieve them until end of school.

So much more freedom.

Smoking was banned on campus for students only my 10th grade year, but Teachers had the smoking lounge in building. There was a teacher's lounge on each hall, the back hall F where weight lifting, welding, home ec, and vocational classes were was where the teacher's smoking lounge was. Most students friendly with teachers could sneak in there and smoke anyhow.

crazy times.

I had a 84 Camaro and kept a flare gun under seat my dad owned a boat and had couple extra flare guns. So I had that for some crazy reason thinking if someone attacked me, at point blank range I'd put on a huge firework show


Then there was the stereotypes that were proven right not wrong.

The jocks hung out together, the headbangers/smokers hung out together, the nerds, the band folks like me as my senior year I was drum major
and the blacks stayed together all in separate cliques at lunch and recess and before/after school.

stereotypes even went further.

the only highschool girls with babies (during time I was there I stress) were black girls, they had to build a daycare from the old mechanic shop behind the highschool for them. And even though this was the early 90s in the south, you'd hear over the Intercom every 6 months "All Black female students to gym at this time please" where they'd get lectured on abstinence, or condom use, and std's and such.

the only time rest of the student body went through that was in 10th grade they'd take the boys one day, and girls the next day.

We had a blast though as the guys, the protection/std talk was given by one of the football coaches, and during the talk with the guys and showing various "shock images" of std's on penis on the TV, when he got to the "sex ed" portion, he flipped in a Nina Hartley porn intro where a nude Nina Hartley showed the correct way to place a condom on. haha was hilarious looking back before "political correctness" went out of control.

I loved highschool and college.

Graduated high school in 94, got associates in 96, took year off then got bachelors in computer science in 99.

But 89-94 (our highschool here in the deep south is 8th through 12th) most are 9-12, but not here. It's still 8-12th here. So it's nothing seeing 12th graders dating 8th graders. Freaky yea, but not unusual.


If you got into a fight, if a coach was around he'd let the fight finish, unless it got a bit too over the top then they'd break it up. You didn't get suspended, you lost recess privileges usually 3 days plus the starter of the fight got 10 licks of the paddle in principle office, the other only got 1 to 3, or if person was just dominated and got ass kicked you just got detention.


Kids didn't act up at all most times. And the reason was Corporal Punishment. Not private paddling either.


Once I was having a bad day, me and "highschool" sweetheart were having a bit of a spat. We sat next to each other so we were bickering a bit during class. Teacher had yelled at me to shut up and do the work. I sighed "Leave me the fuck alone"

bad move.

She called me to front of class and I got 5 licks of paddle in front of everyone. They'd stick finger in your belt loop and yank it up tight to put that extra sting on it. Embarrassing as hell! Even female older teachers who didn't paddle hard, it was just too embarrassing to get paddled, so kids behaved.


And of course if you refused paddling which you could but you'd take a zero for the day's work. few of those in a semester and no matter how hard you worked you were flunking that semester.


But the system worked.

It wasn't until they went crazy insane on political correctness, stopping corporal punishment, and putting cops/rent a cops/guards in schools and after the No Child Left Behind was signed into law, they severely dumbed down kids forcing the smartest to learn at the slowest kids pace. Doc's prescribing SSRI's like candy to kids in MASSIVE quantities, that schools in today's culture are crazy.

Good explanation without a high CS knowledge barrier. (Bonus ease-of-grandma-understanding points for avoiding the use of the word/term/acronym ASCII)

Then again, most people that lack that knowledge probably don't much care *why* it crashes Chrome, they just want it to be fixed. Which I'm sure will be imminent, at which point only CS nerds (like me) care.

...Still, at least I found it interesting!

I love Lil Dicky. He's got serious nerd swag.
*promote

My black friend likes to talk about chicken and watermelon, and then we (group of friends/coworkers of varied races/nationalities/sexualities) ALWAYS laugh. Why do we always laugh? It's not fake or even nervous laughter -- he's just a goddamn funny dude; goes around doing a combination of Urkel and Denzel.

His story is the story of a black man that came to White/Asian Irvine California to teach the other races how to laugh -- and to pick up on hot Asian women near UCI. Sort of the opposite of the Hilarry Swank movie in all regards.

I've lived in areas of Orange County where it was very white and very racist, parts of the American "South" where it was very white and very racist, parts of Orange County where it was very hispanic and very racist, and parts of Orange County where it was so racially diverse no one really cared a goddamn what you look like, other than if you were a nerd or a jock.

Perception of racial issues depends almost entirely on where you live.

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

Your video, Robot Chicken: The Nerd in Oz, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I'm not clear what you mean by compartmentalizing & general friends bit exactly but..

Yes, human tend to gravitate towards distinct groups.
The terms coined would be In-groups or Out-groups.

In terms of society, people who socialize in non-normative ways are stigmatized as part of an Out-group. Any fringe culture.

e.g. - Those weirdo who can only make friends online.


However, for all us interweb nerds. Befriending stranger online IS the norm.

So we become the In-group, and those cocky extroverted socialite types are the Out-group.

This is effectively what's happening when you try to merge two circles of friends and they awkward reject one another.


So more or less.. no, "general" wholly inclusive friendships or In-group are not a thing.

You would all need one common thread.
Somewhere those threads would begin to divert too much and that circle would close ranks.

Hence, why Utopia is impossible.

Cool idea tho.

They forgot the part at the end where the rest of the non sci-fi watching world chimes in to remind them that both sides are a bunch of nerds as far as they are concerned.

Anyone remember TI graphing calculators, which at the time I was using them (90s) I think ran on 8088 processors?

Quite a bit MORE expensive than this. MUCH less powerful, even factoring in Moore's law. AND, they were in no way intended to be an open, hackable design like this is. And even with all those limitations, they became one of the primary "introduction to hardware and software hacking" devices of my generation.

When I was a 16-year-old HS Freshman, I had a TI-81 that I hooked up to a PC with a serial port and "hacked" zShell onto. I learned a bit of assembly code and put on lots of little programs like games etc. onto my calculator. I even got an image display program where you could load up bitmap images that were converted to a specific size and color depth (4-8 grays if I remember right). I got busted in my Geometry class that year looking at a blurry grayscale picture of a topless Pamela Anderson. On my calculator. If that doesn't put me in the running for biggest nerd ever, I don't know what would.

Anyway, I can only see this "Chip" thing (I agree that I'm not too big on the name) as a very cool idea. Sometimes, something as simple as a hackable platform or a blurry 4-bit picture of some boobs can be enough to push someone towards a lifelong interest in IT and other technology. Raspberry Pi and the others are great too, but the price of this one gives it a real leg up in the universal accessibility department!

https://twitter.com/sammaule/status/596825146184355841 (via NC comment section)

Clever indeed. And oh so depressing.

A comment further down put the cherry on top, invoking the Drowned God: "what is debt may never die."

As a nerd and ASoIaF-aficionado, I have to tip my hat. Credit where credit is due, that's a wonderfully depressing pun, given the legal status of student debt.

Ahhhh, those good old pre-social media days. Had the pleasure of bringing a fat Motorola brick cellphone to my SATs. I remember calling home on this HUGE cellphone, feeling all cool -- people were impressed, man. And I mean, important people like chicks. Yesss, growing up during the transition period from "Internet is for dorks" to "Internet is for everybody" was cool, because my parents were techies and I got to be like, "I used Encarta 95 to do my school report."

And that meant debating teachers over its use as a legitimate source, versus the library. Which lead to me being that kid who won against the teacher. Thus chicks. Nerds win sometimes. Oh yes, they win.

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