{"id":7665,"date":"2012-01-11T11:18:33","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T17:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=7665"},"modified":"2015-01-09T15:21:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T21:21:48","slug":"when-did-geeks-get-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/when-did-geeks-get-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"When Did Geeks Get Cool?"},"content":{"rendered":"
I have this friend Erez<\/a>. Erez is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows<\/a>, Visiting Faculty at Google, and has presented<\/a> his ngram reader<\/a> for Google Books at TEDxBoston. Erez is a diverse sort — he’s also worked on genome sequencing<\/a>, an insole to help seniors<\/a> keep their balance, and published a ground-breaking paper on linguistic rules<\/a>. Erez and his wife also run a non-profit<\/a>. I first met him a decade ago when he was working on a Master’s degree in History. From our first conversation, I knew that Erez is one of the coolest people I’ve met (I woudn’t be surprised to one day learn that he’s a secret agent). But when we were growing up (me in Pennsylvania; Erez in Brooklyn), the last word used to describe someone like him would have been cool. What’s changed?<\/p>\n When I was a kid, geek was mostly used to describe adults. Really awful adults. Adults who had no sense of humor, only cared about how things worked, and obviously had no fashion sense. If you looked up ‘geek’ in my brain, you’d see a picture of this guy:<\/p>\n