Nerds of a Feather

Thinking over the subject of my last post, it occurs to me that, while in many ways I'm not at all thrilled about Socorro -- there's that whole being stuck out in the middle of the desert thing, for starters -- it's actually rather difficult for me to imagine living anywhere else. After all, my people are here. Yes, being home to my alma mater, New Mexico Tech, Socorro is packed full of nerds. And, I admit it, nerds are the only people I really can comfortably relate to. I don't know what I'd possibly find to talk about with the guys at work if it wasn't Star Trek, or what I'd do with my friends on the weekends if we weren't playing role-playing games or watching bad science fiction movies.

I was just thinking about this the other day, in fact. I was playing Pictionary with a couple of friends, and at one point I had to draw "greenhouse effect." I drew a picture of the sun, the curve of the Earth, another curve to represent the planet's atmosphere, little wiggly lines to represent the sun's rays coming in through the atmosphere and more wiggly lines to represent the Earth's radiated heat not being able to escape the atmosphere. They got it. Later, I was trying to get someone to say "water," and the usual wavey lines weren't quite cutting it ("um, sea? ocean? boat?") , so I drew a water molecule. They got it immediately. Afterwards, I said something like, "Man, it's nice to be playing this game with people who get that that's supposed to represent water." To which Friend #1 replied, "Of course it's water! How else would you draw water?" And Friend #2 said, "Well, the relative sizes are a little off, but the angle's right." Yes, these are my people.

Friend #2, by the way, is the same guy who, upon being asked in a game of Trivial Pursuit for the name of the first person to fly solo around the Earth said, "Yuri Gagarin." Personally, I think we should have given it to him.