Wednesday, January 26, 2011

You know you're a nerd when...

Last night, the mighty Boilermaker basketball team decided that it didn't want to play the Ohio State team that awaited them on the court.  Thus, my day which I built up to epic proportions in my head ended before it started.  Literally, my cable company is based out of Michigan so I was stuck watching a crappy SEC 2OT game, and I never saw Purdue within 15 points of OSU.

With Purdue trying to hang on to their dignity I had to escape.  I am a loyal fan, but I was already pissed at my cable company and needed to take my mind off of the thrashing that OSU was giving Purdue.  (Every team has off nights and I liked the headline on the student newspaper this morning, "Not Even Close!")  I digress...so I turned the channel to comedy central for tosh.O and started looking for something else to do.  After checking my email and Facebook accounts I decided to tackle some Particle Design homework.  Yes, I choose to do homework to blow off some steam.  I actually got on a pretty good role until Excel decided that probability distributions were too hard for it.  And yes, I installed the Data Analysis add-in, but unless you know how to graph histograms with variable sized bins don't be hatin'! See below.  I finished 2 problems of 7 and felt somewhat better.

The x-axis numbers relate to the beginning of a bin.
They are clearly not the same size!  The overall area should add up to 1,
but it can't because of the unequal bins...damn you Excel!
It was not until I was laying in bed and thinking about the last problem that I realized that I had foregone watching Purdue basketball, however bad, to do homework....and I felt better about myself.  That got me thinking of the things I like to do for fun that are just plain nerdy.  For example;

-I own 3 types of Trivial Pursuit (Pop Culture, Wii video game, and the new Trivial Pursuit Steal) and have on more than one occasion had friends over just to play Trivial Pursuit.
-My top websites that I visit include PopSci.com, Gizmodo.com, io9.com, and pharmtech.com.  They rival my time spent on ESPN.com and facebook.com easily.
-Every sci-fi movie is ultimately interesting to me because I ponder the reality of the situation.  Could something like this happen? You never know.

The list could go on and I know I'm going to get that comment that says, "Hey Matt, you are nerd!"  I understand that I just thought I would share that little insight with you all.  So, if you want, send my your "You know you're a nerd when..." story and I'll post it in the Friday Fragments!

2 comments:

  1. Hold that nerd-head high, Matt! It's nerds like us that make the world go round! Or at least go faster... er... We... make... things?

    Anyway, it sounds like you're really getting into grad school, man. It sounds awesome. I hope to be there next year!

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