geek2geek

It’s Valentine’s Day, I suppose. Cupid’s here holding an arrow to my head until I write something relevant. I already talked about the dating habits of Klingons and androids, what else is there? I could talk about what turns me on: brains.

I was biking home from my accidental Valentine’s date and thinking about a word Jess introduced me to: sapiosexual. “One who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature.” Yo, that’s me!

At some point me and my friends were trying to figure out what my “type” is going back over my past and current trysts. Physically, I’m all over the place. Nothing stood out about their professions or hobbies. What stood out was that everyone was smart, independent, positive, assertive and adventurous. Mental traits, all. Being able to put up with a flaky programmer that wears goofy shoes helps, too.

brains > boobs

Then I thought: how do I convey my sexual preferences to the world in t-shirt form? My first impulse was “Where the smart women at?” I like it, but maybe only because I get the Blazing Saddles reference.

I like my second idea better: “Brains before Boobs“.  (Thanks to Liz Henry for the use of her brains).  Perhaps a simple black shirt with “BRAINS > BOOBS”.

Or you could go with pictures of a stereotypical smart woman and glamor model. The one thing we can all agree on is that I suck at Photoshop.

talk nerdy to me

At a friend-of-a-friend’s party recently, where I didn’t really know anyone, I found myself looking at a woman there and thinking “wow, she’s gorgeous”. It bowled me over. It’s so rare that I have an immediate and physical attraction. I usually find physical traits attractive because they’re associated with mental ones. More often I meet someone can think “eh, she’s ok”. Then she opens her mouth and speaks intelligently about intellectual property or programming or network routing or ontologies or film or makes some awfulsomely geeky pickup line joke (”I wish I were helicase so I could unzip your genes“) and I melt. Suddenly I’m seeing this person differently, and the mental attraction becomes a physical one. I want to say, “hey, let’s talk geek and make out”.

Which is the opposite of the cliché about someone being attractive until they open their mouth. For me you’re attractive after you’ve opened your mouth.

(This is a guest blog post from Selena Deckelmann.)

Let’s say you’re at a conference. There’s some interesting person nearby. You want to talk to them, so you walk up, and say, “Hi, My name is Violet. Can I take a picture of you with me?” The response, “You’re rude.”

You can see her side of the story here. And Fake Steve Job’s take here.

So, maybe that’s not a typical response to a cute girl asking to take your picture.

But approaching a person out of the blue - the in-person equivalent of the “cold call” - is hard. You’ve got to have something interesting to say, then you have to say it, and finally you’re going to have to respond to whatever the other person says. A lot to think and worry about for what may be a 30-second interaction.

Can you tell whether the person you’re talking with is interested in what you’re saying? And if they’re not, can you do anything to make them more interested?

Enter: The Pickup Artist.
Please go on!

I was looking for a sample of Bob Newhart doing one of his famous telephone gags where all you get to hear is his side of the conversation and all the comedy is implied and off-stage. Instead I came across this cell phone ad.

Since we’re talking about the problems of filling information voids with emotional reactions (emotional projection), I thought it apt.

(This is in reply to Sam’s comment about my solution to Warnock’s Dilemma. His response leads into a classic problem, so I hope Sam doesn’t mind that I hijack it to lead into another topic. It’s not personal, just a convenient straight line.)

Sam said,

I don’t really like this no-input-upvoting idea; I think it discourages discussion and encourages establishment of egos and mob rule. You agree? Great. Spend just ten seconds saying WHY, thanks.

I’m one of those people who will fight like hell for the ideal solution, but if it’s not going to work out will settle for a pragmatic one rather than no solution at all. It sure would be great if everyone read my stuff and wrote out their thoughts, but I can’t change how everyone else behaves (because my ORBITAL MIND CONTROL LASERS are busy with the US presidential primaries) and it’s a bit egotistic to assume that people have time to devote to my little post.

Instead of lamenting “if everyone would just do it my way there’d be no problem” I’ll adapt my technique to fit how everyone else acts to get something like the result I wanted in the first place. One might call this manipulation, and it is, but it’s not a dirty word it’s a tool. One you should have in your toolbox and know how to use. Setting up circumstances so that people do what you want without their even thinking about it is a central idea of usability design, and the usability is just another expression of geek communications… but that’s another post.

I agree with Sam’s sentiment about mob rule — you’ll note that the votes don’t do anything — but rather than no input at all I’ll take some input, even if it’s flawed, and apply the necessary grains of salt. It is better than, in the absence of any information, making shit up (which is wholly reserved for these posts).

(Sam, you’ve been a good sport. If you’ll just remain under the microscope for a few more moments this will all be over soon. It’s for science. And stop wriggling, you’ll throw off the readings and we’ll have to start all over again!)

Speaking of making shit up, it’s interesting to observe Sam’s tenor towards the users who don’t reply or just give a +1. It comes across as decidedly negative, the “thanks” is bitter and sarcastic. As if he’s already decided that the people who didn’t give a thoughtful reply are bad people. They’ve done something wrong. And this is the interesting thing about information voids, we abhor them and tend to fill them with negative emotions. Who knows why they didn’t reply? That’s the crux of Warnock’s Dilemma, you can’t know. Yet a decision has already been made at some level. It is particularly interesting that the +1 equivalent in real life, a head nod of agreement, does not illicit such a negative reaction. Why is that? Perhaps because the thing keeping us all basically positive social creatures in Real Life is empathy hard-coded to faces. But that, too, is another post.

(Thank you, Sam. You’re free to go.)

It’s been almost half a year since I set up this blog and a mailing list to discuss geek2geek communications. Geeks communicating with other geeks and also mere humans. The subject got a lot of attention at OSCON and BarCampBlock. As these things go, I never got around to writing things up. Well, it’s a new year so let’s get things started.

Of course, where to start. I’ve been having trouble with that, everything’s so interconnected. So I’ll begin at the beginning, where the idea came from.

For the non-programmers out there, I promise it’s not going to be all about programming but you might have to indulge me my coding metaphors while I get to the point.

This all started when I was preparing for my big OSCON tutorial last year, the ambiguously titled “Simple Ways To Be A Better Programmer” aka “What Works in Software Development” aka (my favorite) “How To Be Lazy Without Really Trying”. This is a tutorial I’ve given many times before for many years. It’s my opportunity to have 200 programmers captive while I brainwash them for 3 hours. The title is clever and vague so they don’t know what they’re getting into. Usually I teach whatever it is I think programmers are struggling with that year. Particularly things they don’t teach you in college. Not that I’d know, I failed out.

Usually it focuses on things like version control, documentation, names, testing, refactoring and so forth. Mostly coding issues. This year I proposed the same basic thing as always but it didn’t get me terribly excited. Then right after it was accepted I got a much better idea. Typical. As with all good things, the idea came from my kitchen.

Alton Brown’s show Good Eats could be instead titled Analytical Cooking. (If you hate cooking shows, watch this one.) He breaks down cooking into methodologies and techniques, rather than a series of recipes you’re supposed to follow by rote and guesswork. The cookbook associated with the show, really more of a cooking textbook then a traditional list of recipes, is I’m Just Here For The Food. Emblazoned on the cover is a simple equation that sums his grand philosophy:

food + heat = cooking

He breaks down cooking not by dish but by heating method and focuses his efforts on teaching them.

It’s simple and poignant. Where do I get one of those?

Where indeed? The answer is provided…