At last! Science draws a line between geeks and nerds
At long last, a line of demarcation more clearly dividing the respective territories of geeks and nerds is being drawn with the help of (what else?) science.
Scientist and software engineer Burr Settles took on a little weekend project this year to try to more precisely define the realms of geekdom and nerdaliciousness using data scraped from Twitter.
Settles took a look at how often various words occurred within tweets alongside "geek" and "nerd" and then, using a mathematical equation that I sadly am not quite nerdy enough to explain adequately here (Settles finds "math" to be a much stronger part of the nerd vocabulary, as is the word "vocabulary"), plotted the following graph to serve as our first-ever atlas of a subcultural universe occupied by two sometimes dueling empires.… Read more