NSLog();

8 Comments »

8 Responses to "You Know You’re a Nurb When…"

1. | Reply eli sarver
   Posted 23 Apr 2003 at 7:19pm #
   

   You know you are a nurb when you render really well with phong shading, but you take up very little moder memory.

   Wait, that makes me a graphis dork, doesn't it?

2. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 23 Apr 2003 at 7:26pm #
   

   For what it's worth, it's a bit of an inside joke that "nurb" is like a cool "nerd" with some of my friends. "Nurb" is one of those fun words to say, and so I've long been saying "hey nurb" to greet friends on AIM. I even called David Hyatt an über-nurb here.

   But yes, eli, I get your drift. For those who are a bit confused, "NURB" is a graphics term for "Non-Uniform Rational B-splines." For what that means, google it.

3. | Reply amy
   Posted 23 Apr 2003 at 8:01pm #
   

   Cool nerd... wouldn't that be geek? My friends and I tend to consider nerds as those with little or no social skills, who don't know how to act or treat people at all, and geeks as more personable. A geek can be quiet and introverted, but generally they are fun to be around when they come out of themselves. We are (mostly) geeks.

4. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 23 Apr 2003 at 8:18pm #
   

   I consider myself a geek first and foremost. Nerds tend to like Star Trek, and I've never even seen a whole episode. Regardless, the real impetus behind my adoption of this word is that it sounds cooler than "geek" sometimes. A little change of pace is good, I feel. 🙂

5. | Reply Quarter Life Crisis
   Posted 24 Apr 2003 at 7:37pm #
   

   Church Neck Genres

   Stupid: When discussing how the complex analysis lecture I am tutoring for this semester is going to be run,...

6. | Reply eb
   Posted 18 Dec 2003 at 8:57am #
   

   Don't call yourself a geek! No one would want to be called a geek, given it's actual meaning. Geeks were circus sideshow performers who did things like bite the heads off of live chickens. These were people of limited mental ability who had precious few options in life.

   I would not want to be called a nerd either. The accepted definitions these days are: (quoted from Dictionary.com)

   1)A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.

   2) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

   NERD: The word nerd first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry).

   Nerd next appears in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerd: a square, any explanation needed?”

   The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’”

   Authorities disagree on whether the two nerds, Dr. Seuss's small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mail are the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”

   NURB is a fun word, and as someone who builds 3D models with NURBS I would not feel slighted if someone called me NURB (I have always felt a bit non-uniform anyway).

7. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 18 Dec 2003 at 9:42am #
   

   Definitions are old. The words mean different things now, and if Oxford and Webster can't keep up, that's fine. Lots of words have "bad" original meanings but now mean good things or vice versa. A word's etymology often has little impact on its current usage.

8. | Reply andy
   Posted 18 Dec 2003 at 12:17pm #
   

   I can quite identify with "someone with objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person". Being non-critical on yourself is a bad characteristic in my book.

   My persistance of life is that it's a permanent process to improve yourself (psychologically, physiologically, mentally). If you think of yourself in a positive light, there's nothing to improve on.