28 July, 2008

The Nerdery: s02e14: On nerds

Eleven (11) days ago (relative to publishing), while scoffing down the excess amount of pizza available at the Nexus contributor meeting, I found a copy of Nexus, issue five (5) from 2005 (two thousand, five). For those not 4th year or older, it was an issue dedicated to nerds and nerdihood. Josh then proceeded to point out the nerd figurine atop the arcade machine, and at that point I nearly cried when I saw it had been disfigured.

One of the articles was what it is like to be a nerd. As I sit in one of my COMP papers, looking around for my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend who is supposedly also doing this paper (that said I've never seen him in here...), it gives me pause to think of how far we've come over the last few decades. Nerding has really become an accepted part of society, or at the very least we're no longer at the bottom (to which we owe the emo and emo-esque crowd for displacing us up the chain). But, before I get all boring and philosophical, I call to enlighten all Level one (1) and higher nerds;

For those not in the know, the new library that the uni is building actually has less space for books than the current library (read: Wintec Student Hub). As such, books that are "of no value" to the uni library are going to be stored by Crown Relocations while the new building is built, and afterwards will be destroyed. Most of the books on this list haven't been checked out in a a few years, and are deemed to have no or little significance. That said, at the SCMS BoS meeting, a few interesting titles were brought up which have geek cultural significance.

These titles include books written in the 1980s (nineteen eighties) about AI and one that was written by two NZ computer science professors. For nostalgic types these are the goldmine collection, and it's a shame we don't have storage capacity. The most interesting fact about this disposals process however is that departments will not be able to take these to-be-destroyed books and put in their offices, tearooms, private libraries etc. If you're interested you'd better get in contact with someone from the library (sorry, didn't catch any names. To quote former editor Roz; "This is professional journalism").