Profiles in Nerdery: Mark Seemann, he knows his Lucky Charms

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  • Astrological Sign: Western: Gemini. Eastern: Rabbit. … I’m a split hare.
  • Time at the Nerdery:

  • Area of expertise: Breaking code, chess, breaking things, modesty, PHP hackery, arbitrary lists, puns, teh internets, cube mods, pick, poke, peek, games, fencing, counting, bughouse, jQuery, finding areas under curves, sounding smart, guessing, precision, luck, commas, ellipses…
  • When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I start to explain the development process then hesitate, bring up recent projects and awesome coding tools, realize this is going way over their heads, simplify it to short and general statements pertaining to anthropomorphized scripts and happy little servers, reconsider my audience, then sigh audibly and say, “I make websites.”
  • Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Nothing brings more glee than finding the subtle hidden unanticipated trick to make a patch of code explode. Except maybe discovering a tight solution to a stubborn problem that’s been holding back a project. Or seeing and executing a forced checkmate in seven moves. Or a well-timed joke to make someone laugh then cry because she has a sore stomach from laughing too much already. Or maybe…
  • What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: There are dogs here at work. True, they may not have the cleanest code, their methods are a little unorthodox, but they get results.
  • Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Jeopardy Categories 2. Etymology 3. Fencing Tricks 4. The Erdos–Faber–Lovász conjecture 5. Lucky Charms Marshmallows 6. Random & Pointless Trivia 7. Transcendental Numerology
  • Favorite Fictional Nerd: I couldn’t think of one. I thought of many. In no particular order: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Angus MacG, Dr. Larry Kyle, Gyro Gearloose, Dr. Emmett Brown, Gune, Dr. Horrible, Jeff Albertson, Dr. Roy Hinkley, Richard Langley, Dr. Zefram Cochrane, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, er whup, those aren’t fictional.
  • According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: If one traces the word back to its roots, the origins of the term are derived from the Greek: “etymon” meaning true sense, and “logy” meaning logic. Transcribed from Middle English as ethimologie, the phrase entered common… oh wait, that’s the etymology of “etymology”.