Meme Time

From elhamisabel

This is rubbish - I have a life you know!

Pure Nerd 69 % Nerd, 30% Geek, 43% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd. The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful. Congratulations! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you're interested in any of the following: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Professional Wrestling Love & Sexuality America/Politics Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 79% on nerdiness You scored higher than 38% on geekosity You scored higher than 74% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

More musing on Literature and Mathematics

A thought struck me, following recent digressions on maths and writing.

Mathematics doesn't hit the news very often. When it does, it's usually the story of how the largest known prime number has been identified and it has zillions of digits. This is silly because

• There's no great mathematics in finding a yet larger prime. It's long been proved there are an infinite number of them, and finding them is a joib for digital brute force rather than mathematical ingenuity.
  
• In between waves of media hype about Largest Prime Numbers, several other largest known primes have been identified. The media story is a periodic function!
  
• Sure, large primes are valuable in cryptography, but not, I think, ones as large as the Mersenne primes which are being hunted down - the Mersenne primes are, I believe, a special case which are comparatively easy to identify.
  

No doubt a real mathematician will be along in a minute to tell me that what I just wrote is a load of bollocks. That's fine, I'm happy to be enlightened.

Anyway, enough of that. The thought that struck me was that mathematicians are so much more fortunate people than writers of fiction is because nobody ever tells them that trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis is pretentious because the Riemann Hypothesis is not relevant to Ordinary People, and they should concentrate on adding up the supermarket bill.

(Another thought that occurred to me was that while Dr du Sautoy skirts around the nature of the Riemann Hypothesis and describes it in vague terms, nowhere does he ever say succinctly what the Riemann Hypothesis actually is. Is there anybody readingt this who could enlighten me?)