You know you are a geek when...

[C1ay]

I checked my work (geeks do this) and indeed the division attached to post #116 is base 20. I made up the word icosadecimal:naughty:; is icosageismal more convincing?

 

Base 20 notation is actually vigesimal. There is a table of base notation systems here.

[CraigD]

I think it is actually icosadecimal division? [math]mbox{F}4_{20} div 6[/math] :confused:

My fault – that is indeed correct base 20 division. :doh: You’d think after threads about division like 4639 I’d be a bit sharper to pick up on long division in unusual bases!

I'm curious why you used lower case as I understood upper case is standard? :confused: :fly: :D

An interesting question. AFAIK, letter case in numeral glyph schemes for bases greater than ten don’t matter – ie: [math]5\mbox{a}_{16} = 5\mbox{A}_{16}[/math]. Lower case numbers have a nearly unconscious greater “coolness factor” (I think due to most unixs having case sensitive names, while DOS-ish operating system do not, though that’s just an amateur cultural anthropologist opinion :) ).

Base 20 notation is actually vigesimal.

I’m not sure if this knowledge is in the Geek magisterium – more in that of a Classics scholar. :shrug:

[Turtle]

My fault – that is indeed correct base 20 division. :doh: You’d think after threads about division like 4639 I’d be a bit sharper to pick up on long division in unusual bases!

Well, it's not often you give me any such opportunity, and I rufelly confess that you shook my confidence & sent me scrambling to double-check the calculation. :eek::hyper: Curiouserlly geeky still is that I did the calculation as a fun arts & crafts project to post in the Art Gallery.

 

I'm curious why you used lower case as I understood upper case is standard?

An interesting question. AFAIK, letter case in numeral glyph schemes for bases greater than ten don’t matter – ie: [math]5\mbox{a}_{16} = 5\mbox{A}_{16}[/math]*. Lower case numbers have a nearly unconscious greater “coolness factor” (I think due to most unixs having case sensitive names, while DOS-ish operating system do not, though that’s just an amateur cultural anthropologist opinion :) )

*{latex reference: [math]5\mbox{a}_{16} = 5\mbox{A}_{16}[/math]}

 

I see that the Mathworld reference C1ay gave gives a taxonomy of upper case beginning with A=10 and I have seen similar references which then go on to begin with lower case "a" for base 37 and up to base 62 before the alphabetic scheme is exhausted. Since I am a geek and I do do these calculations for fun I do need to adopt some consistent scheme for doing so in longhand. I have in the past made up my own symbols. :eek::hyper:

 

This misunderstanding put me in mind of making up similar problems so as to leave the base ambiguous and see if it can be deduced. Here's another I did for the Gallery; again I have to check the base myself from the original score. YKYAAGW you get this jazzed over minutia of numbers. :hihi:

[alexander]

You know you are a geek when you prefer using the command line over a drag and drop utility.

 

Like seriously, i would rather type in "gpg --encrypt --sign --armor --output message.gpg message_to_encrypt" rather then actually drag and drop that stuff.... lol call me weird

[Theory5]

You know you are a geek when you watch Futurama episodes every once in a while to remember was the show is like. (and you say to yourself "thats impossible" when there is some sort of impossible explanation on the show.

(alexander, now I remember what episode that clip is from!)didja accually convert it or just find it on the internet?

[alexander]

lol theory, like the episode when they collected gravitons, or a hollowed out planet.

 

You know you are a geek when you carry a mini flash light that fits invisibly in your dress shirt pocket :hihi:

 

You know you are a geek if you wear a binary watch (for more then show)

 

You know you are a geek if UML does not draw a language association first.

 

You know you are a geek if you know just how bad the TCP stack code in Vista is (for example vista fails horribly if you have multiple gateways)

 

You know you are a geek if you have a Hypography mug with coffee sitting on your work desk.

 

You know you are a geek if the word "Drive" does not associate with any sport.

 

You know you are a geek if you have a stack of CDs with no identification as to what is on them.

 

You know you are a geek if you have 2 personal laptops, and neither runs windows, but also neither runs a similar OS.

 

You know you are a geek if you can bash not only on windows, and dos, but also linux, freebsd, os x and sun os.

 

You know you are a geek if you can proficiently program in more languages then you speak (this may be a duplicate)

 

You know you are a geek if you have more then 2 directional wifi antennas

 

You know you are a geek if you have posted in this thread

 

You know you are a geek if you bring a book to a intro to physics class, just so you don't get bored (that class, seriously wastes so much of my time)

 

You know you are a geek if you know how Fahrenheit obtained his scale

 

You know you are a geek if you know how a professor from University of Connecticut is planning to make time travel work

 

You definitely know you are a geek if you constantly correct the stand point of shortest distance between 2 points being a straight line to it being a geodesic

 

And finally, you know you are a geek if upon the discussion of thermodynamics, and temperature gage discussion, you have to remind the class that at 0K not all molecular movement stops, Helium, under normal pressures, fails to solidify and remains in liquid form, therefore there is molecular motion (not the case at 25bars of pressure though, it will solidify at 1-1.5K, and becomes a highly compressible solid :doh: )

[Theory5]

You know you are a geek if you know how a professor from University of Connecticut is planning to make time travel work

elaborate please! :-)

oh, and you know you are a geek if you can understand what is posted on this forum.

And you know you are a geek when you can take a quick look at any peripheral connection and you automatically know what it is. (I'm not talking about simple ones that go into the computer, I mean like a variation of, say, a USB port.)

[alexander]

And you know you are a geek when you can take a quick look at any peripheral connection and you automatically know what it is

 

naw, that generally means that you are in keen with computers, and that in itself does not satisfy the geek class, you have to have the ability to recognize any port on any computer device, know most useful abbreviations, like for example, if you know what an rs232 cable is without looking it up, and you know what i'm talking about when i say that Intel quad core really is not quad core at all, just 2 dual cores connected over FSB, and that's quite limiting

[TheBigDog]

naw, that generally means that you are in keen with computers, and that in itself does not satisfy the geek class, you have to have the ability to recognize any port on any computer device, know most useful abbreviations, like for example, if you know what an rs232 cable is without looking it up, and you know what i'm talking about when i say that Intel quad core really is not quad core at all, just 2 dual cores connected over FSB, and that's quite limiting

Geek is a relative term. Being able to recognize electronics peripherals at a glance while you are among a population of cheerleaders or football players is the trademark of a geek. Being able to do the same among the other members of the AV club is a norm. So the AV club is geek compared to the norm, but members of the AV club are not geek to each other, they are a norm. It is interesting that we said earlier that obsession with many things qualified you as geek, but the rule doesn't hold true for very popular things. You don't hear people called a soccer geek, or a football geek, even through they may be as geeky about those topics as Alex is about computers - even when most people use computers in their everyday life. That being said...

 

You know you are a geek when you wax on and on and debate about the relative meaning of the word geek.

 

Bill

[Erasmus00]

It is interesting that we said earlier that obsession with many things qualified you as geek, but the rule doesn't hold true for very popular things. You don't hear people called a soccer geek, or a football geek, even through they may be as geeky about those topics as Alex is about computers

 

This reminded me of this onion article Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Database | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

-Will

[jedaisoul]

In my day, you knew you were a geek when you could read and write 8080 machine code. Of course, that was back in the eight bit days when the machine language had only a couple of hundred operators. And memory was counted in Kilo bytes. And computer virues had not been invented. Nor had the internet. The days of innocence.

[alexander]

You don't hear people called a soccer geek, or a football geek, even through they may be as geeky about those topics as Alex is about computers - even when most people use computers in their everyday life. That being said...

i am not the best example, but i can tell you this, i have seen football and soccer and baseball geeks.

 

What qualifies you a computer geek, is knowing more about your computer then average people will ever have a need to, knowing the inner workings, knowing the background stuff, knowing it in such detail that most normal people just don't care to get. An average computer person, knows a total of about as much information about the computer as an advanced football fan, although you may not realize it, such is the case (at least by my rough estimate) The geekhood is obtained by doing a lot more then just knowing players and a few plays (and following a team). Football geekhood is obtained by knowing a large amount of football facts, historic and otherwise, records, flashy games, so forh. ESPN actually has a room full of those people, and when you hear the announcer say a fact on their chanel, they are being fed by a specialist in that sport, whom, by all means, i consider a sport geek.

 

But if you want to go that route, let's further look into what "geek" really is. Geek is a wrapper, a wrapper for an overly intellectual individual. Think of it as a (trying to think of a way to explain it to you without using computing for explanation) aah, think of it as a celestial object, a big, massive object, but if i leave it at that, and you say, ooh yea, celestial object, well that really just means that its a large body of matter, there is a need for further classification. It's a root of a tree with many different branches, and as in an evolutionary tree, there are many, many different directions that the tree goes to describe what geek is. In computer terms, think of it as the TCP/IP wrapper, anyone have any idea how many protocols make up this wrapper, anyone have a book, I actually am interested to find out...?

 

(lets see how many i can think of off the top of my head: IP, ARP, ICMP, IGMP, UDP, DHCP, DNS, NTP, NNTP, IRC, POP3, IMAP, SIP, SMTP, SNMP, RARP, SSH, telnet, RPC, BOOTP, NETBIOS, RPC, RIP, SOAP, STUN, CDP, CRP, RSVP, TCP, PPTP, ICMPv6, CSTP, IPsec, CIDR, MIME, DTP, IGRP, FTP, HTTP, NFS, SMB, LDAP, RTP, SCTP, H.245, RTCP, Gopher.... hell, there are more, i just dont remember... )

 

Point being ofcourse that there are many things that make a geek a geek, and its not just computer things, its any extraneous knowledge.

 

P.S. from myself, do you have any idea how much random stuff a football geek would have to know to amount to my computer geekdom?.... just out of curiosity, and i dont claim to be the specialist here on the matters, jut curious as to how much you think i know (its impossible to assess for yourself so it's easier when someone tells you :cup: )

 

and theory, how much elaboration would you like, i can start with the fact that he is planning to use laser beams at right angles to create a wormhole big enough to pass one atomic particle through time, but yeah, just how much elaboration would you like on the subject?

[TheBigDog]

Please insert the geek line...

 

Who was Pele?

What is a bicycle kick?

How many goals did Pele score with a bicycle kick?

What teams did he play for at the time?

What teams were they against?

What goalies were they against?

Who got the assists?

How many goals did he miss using a bicycle kick?

Who was the first player to record a goal using a bicycle kick?

What other players in history have scored goals using a bicycle kick?

Do you have access to materials that contain these answers without having to do a broad internet search?

 

Someplace in answering those questions you switch from being the a fan to being a soccer geek.

 

Bill

[Buffy]

Who was Pele?

Uh, she's the Hawaiian goddess of volcanos... wait, what does this have to do with kicking? Or soccer?

Someplace in answering those questions you switch from being the a fan to being a soccer geek.

Gee, I don't even get into the first group, huh?

 

Mai ke ao lapa i ka lani, :P

Tita Buffy

[Pyrotex]

...when you write Geek poetry?

 

Back when I was truly a computer geek, I wrote this poem . Yes, it's autobiographical.

 

Can anybody remember what an "Octane" was?

Clue: Silicon Graphics

[alexander]

you know you are a geek if you have written a perl script to generate pseudo random haiku and short poems.... (and use it to pass your college english class) (p.s. i didn't do this, a friend of mine did)

 

you know you are a geek if you write geek rap, i shall write some and post it here :lightning

 

you know you are a geek if you are coding a simulation for scheduling algorithms, in a group of 5 and you are the one who's coding everything. i shall post what i have so far in the learning C++ thread in a few :naughty:

 

you know you are a geek when you check everything you download with md5sum, and check contents of any cd burned for you with the md5sum just to make sure that it contains what it claims it does

[alexander]

OMG, you guys have to be an uber geek to know this one...

 

You know you are a geek if you roll a d20 on a skill check to figure out if you are OK to drive today....