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Nerdy interests thread


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12 hours ago, PaganBugAce said:

 

Hi! My name is Tiffany (new on this site)! I am also an undergratuate studying to be an entomologist. Do you have any book recs on insects?

Hello there! It's a pleasure and an honor to meet a fellow insect enthusiast, and a serious student of entomology at that. Do you have a particular specialty planned? I'm equally fascinated by all sorts of insects generally, but with so many orders among them it's difficult to give equal attention to them all, and I'm most comfortable with beetles and flies. 

 

Having no actual formal education on the subject to speak of and living in the United States, most of the books I read are focused more or less specifically on the insects of the Nearctic region, and they may not be as helpful to those who live and study elsewhere. That being said, the following books should hopefully be interesting and useful to anyone with an appreciation for entomology.

 

American Insects: A Handbook of the Insects of America North of Mexico by Ross H. Arnett, Jr. is an excellent general reference for the insects of North America. If you have a particular interest in flies, Flies: the Natural History and Diversity of Diptera by Stephen A. Marshall is perhaps the best book I know of on them. The Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America is my personal favorite to have on hand in the field while I'm turning over logs and examining every flower for bugs. 

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I can tell you tons of random facts about different animals, especially pertaining to venomous ones. I can also tell you random history facts pertaining to some of the spookier towns in my area. I'm also a huge marching band nerd. My username even comes from the Dr. Beat Metronome brand that most bands use. I follow Drum Corps International really closely, and I probably would have tried out for it if I didn't play saxophone (they don't accept woodwinds). My favorite show is the 2015 Blue Knights 'Because,' featuring Flight to Paradise and Heart of Courage. My favorite corps in general is the Academy because I love their aesthetic. 

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Don't even get me started on Disney trivia. I can go on all day (and maybe many more)

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On 8/16/2019 at 5:22 AM, AllTimeBubble said:

I did a tonne of research before I got my blue tongue skink so now I know quite a few facts about them, such as how to tell the difference between all the different subspecies; Australian or Indonesian; halmahera or merauke; northern or eastern. I also know all the different humidity requirements of each one. 

I suppose that counts as a nerdy interest now because I try to learn as much as I can about a lot of reptiles

Same here!

I got into researching herpetology before I got my leopard gecko, and now I'm fascinated with it.

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My boyfriend and I sell art at comic cons around our tri-state area. Recently I've been playing around with sculpture, mold-making, and resin casting. It's been interesting, there's been a lot of trial and error.

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On 8/21/2019 at 1:24 PM, seapancake said:

My boyfriend and I sell art at comic cons around our tri-state area. Recently I've been playing around with sculpture, mold-making, and resin casting. It's been interesting, there's been a lot of trial and error.

Neat! Do you have a website?

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One of my particularly nerdy interests is the JFK assassination. Get ready for some eye glaze as I talk about ballistics!

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1 hour ago, GlamRocker said:

One of my particularly nerdy interests is the JFK assassination. Get ready for some eye glaze as I talk about ballistics!

I've always wanted to learn more about the JFK assassination, but more so I can be a better judge of whether the CIA did it than anything else (currently I'm pretty convinced it was the CIA). I love conspiracy stuff, as long as it's actually plausible and not Flat-Earth-tier nonsense. I have a book on the JFK assassination on my shelf but haven't gotten around to reading it.

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@Some guy, start at the source. Read the Warren Report.

 

I'm a lone gunman theory believer. Though after that, the CIA doing it and using Oswald as a patsy, just as he said, would be the one. Oswald wouldn't have been innocent either way, because the only way they could have used him like that is if he was in on it but thought the assassination was aborted, explaining why he was in such a recent and convenient position to commit the assassination, as well as his very unprepared state and attempt to escape.

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thequietplace
On 8/18/2019 at 9:37 PM, Member114264 said:

I guess i know how to fly a cessna 172, random trivia, some organic chemistry, beer making, horticulture and other stuff.

I supposed my isolation makes me interested in scientific things.

I'd love to be able to fly!

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2 minutes ago, thequietplace said:

I'd love to be able to fly!

It's not as hard as it seems if you learn quickly.

The feeling of taking off is fun.

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thequietplace

That's my favourite part of commercial flying - I've done microlighting and paragliding but pilot lessons are ££££!

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Neutral Charge

There was something similar for the solar probe but that one wont probably survive, this tho seems much more interesting, im in for it 😂

https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/mars2020?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASA&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=72617152

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16 hours ago, thequietplace said:

Amateur astronomy...I will find M51, I will dammit...why didn't I just get a go-to??

My friend has a telescope, and I once spent the night at his house so we could look at Jupiter and lunar craters.  He lives out in the middle of nowhere, so there's hardly any light pollution.

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thequietplace
11 minutes ago, Karst said:

My friend has a telescope, and I once spent the night at his house so we could look at Jupiter and lunar craters.  He lives out in the middle of nowhere, so there's hardly any light pollution.

Awesome!

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Strange-quark

WHY I'M ONLY SEEING THIS NOW? The thread I mean. And btw I'm not shouting, just talking in runes 😏

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Neutral Charge
On 8/26/2019 at 3:58 PM, Karst said:

My friend has a telescope, and I once spent the night at his house so we could look at Jupiter and lunar craters.  He lives out in the middle of nowhere, so there's hardly any light pollution.

I saved 500 pounds and got me one, ppl called me crazy but the things i saw and seeing them was a very deep and pleasent experience if you can afford it its so worth it

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  • 1 year later...
J. van Deijck

Shortwave radio. 

I have no licence, although I have been thinking of it. I'm still particularly interested in all the shortwave oddities, military stations, number stations and other things of unknown purpose. I often spend my free time just fishing for them.

And yes, physics and chemistry. Radioactivity, electricity, things like that. I love cables. I just do. And also robots and artificial intelligence. 

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I'm a big fan of four things: Manga, Music, history and custom built PC's. Kinda meh for a 33 year old, probably, but I enjoy it. I'm not very creative or anything, so I'm not very creative or anything. I will admit though, I enjoy drawn art, historical accuracy in films and comics, music with a lot of depth and layers, and tinkering with my PC.

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I never considered myself a nerd up until now, but the warning signs are clearly there. I am a hardcore Harry Potter fan and love books in general. I love Stark Trek and Farscape, which are my guilty pleasures on a bad day. I just got into DnD and am now in love. I started watching Dimension 20's DnD series, and I am really invested. I am in love with science and get way to excited by Discover magazine. 

I can't hide from it- I am officially a nerd.

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I enjoy reading scientific research articles. Mostly ecology, botany and zoology, but if the topic interests me, I'll also take medicine, history, chemistry, or geology. I think I would be interested in physics as well, if I understood more 😆

Currently I'm working on my thesis and the fact that my subject is environmental law is increasingly becoming an excuse to read anything and everything that sounds as if it could be vaguely related to biodiversity and climate change (and let's be honest - what's not - at least tangentially - related to biodiversity and climate change...?)

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I love this thread, all of this is great. 

 

Cosmology is awesome. And robots. And military stuff. 

 

I have also a mild interest in (computer) games. I don’t have a favourite one yet. 

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I'm something of a nerd stereotype.  My main computer is one that I assembled from parts, and it runs Linux (Gentoo Linux, at that).  I'm a programmer by training and current job (and sometimes code in my spare time, too).  I have large anime and written SF&F collections, a moderate manga collection, and a shelfful of older videogames, mostly JRPGs.  I have an endless memory for useless trivia, with an emphasis on things science- and history-related.  I own a 3D printer, and know just enough about electronics to be dangerous to myself and others.

 

I have way too many hobbies and interests. 😅

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Linux and assembled computers - yasss. I’m also a programmer. And I approve the anime and manga part. 

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I have a dual boot computer with Ubuntu (runs better than Windows 10, since the device is a bit older and more economic), and Mint and a Kali (for cybersecurity class) on Virtual Box and a Debian on a pen drive. But oh well, Kali is the only more exotic distro that I have. And I haven’t worked with OpenSuse, idk how come. 

 

I program mostly in Java nowadays. Plain old web programming. I also play with machine learning and data science in Python. Although. Without an effect that I would like. I touched a lot of other programming languages too, but I won’t bore you with that. I had a lot of C and C++ at school. 

 

Plus, programming is my job, not a hobby, but it’s a job I really enjoy. 

 

And I just read your post about hobbies @ZCE. Just to say: HTML and CSS aren’t really programming languages. They’re markup languages. You can’t write a program in them, in a strict sense. They don’t have basic programming structures such as memory management, loops, functions etc. I’m also not sure about SQL and some script languages like Visual Basic and about Bash/Batch scripts, they’re said to be scripts not programs. Just saying so that you’re aware :P 

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My work computer is stuck on Windows 10 since its Windows 7 predecessor had a hard-drive meltdown last year.  It's the only non-Linux computer I have to deal with right now, thankfully.  Hate the damned thing.  Other than that, my big desktop (first-gen Threadripper-based, so it's a couple of years old now), laptop (vintage 2008), and the Pi3 that's sitting on the shelf by the router acting as a pseudo-NAS all run Gentoo.  With TDE as a desktop environment, in the case of the desktop and laptop (the Pi is headless), which probably means that I own at least 5% of all the computers in the world with that combination of software. 😅

 

I'm forced to use Visual Basic .Net for work purposes—not that it matters much, since 90% of what I write there is CRUD database code, which is kind of boring in any language.  My current spare-time projects encompass Perl, Bash shell script (in the form of a bunch of Gentoo packaging stuff), some PHP, and it looks like I'm going to be taking up Lua again.  Previously, I've worked in Java and in Free Pascal.

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20 minutes ago, ZCE said:

To be fair, I did say scripts.

My experience is that when someone says "script", they actually mean "written in a language that's normally interpreted and not compiled (JIT compilers excepted)".  I have yet to run into a general-use "scripting language" that did not qualify as a full, Turing-complete programming language.  (Granted, some of them are pretty ugly examples.) 

 

20 minutes ago, ZCE said:

I have like 4 Raspberry Pis, and only one of them is actively running (a Pi 4 4GB).

I have another Pi3 and a Pi Zero (the original Zero that they aren't making anymore) stashed away in a box waiting for me to get around to the projects they're earmarked for.

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On 11/19/2020 at 9:46 PM, ZCE said:

I knew I was going to get this spiel... but I was too lazy to point this out.

Alright :P 

 

I wonder - what is the OS that runs on Pis and Arduinos? Is it Debian? I don’t have one of my own. 

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