BaalChatzaf, on Apr 16 2009, 10:56 PM, said:
If it makes sense to you, you are a Nerd. If it doesn't you are a Normal.
See if you can figure out how to program this. I did a schematic algorithm using finite state automata.
If you had not tipped your hand, I might have blown it off, but not wanting to be a mere normal, I spent some time with it. However, I confess that I must be truly a normal and not truly a nerd because I did not think to "program" it. IN fact, I lost interest in it.
A few weeks ago, my brother call me an "animal" because I told him that I hate arbitrary tasks. I never work crosswords or suduko or stuff like that. I only work if there is a purpose for me, i.e., a reward, hence, the "animal" subroquet.
In numismatics, I never got below or beyond a certain level in any direction. In other words, some people collect "one of each" for a full set. I never did. Other people buy magnifiers and even microscopes. I have a 3X hand lenses for just in case, but for me, this is naked-eye stuff: it's either obvious or it's not and minor deviations are of minor interest, at best.
However, I do like history. I like the researching and reporting. I get paid for that. So, there is that pavlovian thing again, but on its own merits, I enjoy just looking for facts, mining the data, you might say, and then putting into an explanatory framework.
I did one tough project where this guy had two different satellite feeds and a homebrew network of PCs and to solve the problem, I brought some assembler tutorials and had myself locked in the office over the weekend and on Sunday afternoon, I had a solution that I wrote directly in DEBUG in hex. ... but, again, I was getting paid for this. I would not have done it just for the heck of it.
Sometimes things interest me on their own. In computer programming, one of the things I did was to write Fortran so that it looked like Cobol just to do it. There was one programming class I took over again because I finished it with a C+. The final project was to write a Roman Numeral Parser. When I realized that there was no algorithm, that it was all grunt work, I quit hacking at it.
Mike M.
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