Profiles in Nerdery: Kai Esbensen, defying witty headlines

1. Astrological Sign: Astrology promotes a lack of critical thinking. Critical thinking saves lives. Ergo, astrology kills. Birthdays, by way of contrast, promote life — mine is St. Valentine’s Day.
2. Time at the Nerdery: At the time of this writing, just about exactly 20 megaseconds.
3. Area of expertise: Proper science test procedure, severe storm morphology, water vapor dynamics, sleep deprivation, and kittens.
4. When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I cut them off, mid-sentence and say, “Oh yeah? Well, why don’t you tell me what YOU do?” And then before they can respond, I cut them off again and say, “Yeah, that’s what I THOUGHT.” Then we stare awkwardly at one another for a while, until one of us bursts into tears. Pretty soon someone’s mother is called. I forget what happens after that.
5. Favorite kinds of projects to work on: The kind of projects where there’s time travel, and you get to fly under your own power, and you come away from it having gained telekinetic abilities.
6. What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: The fact that everybody who works here gets their very own executive office suite overlooking the ocean.
7. Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: #1. Tornadoes. #2. Time Signatures and Polyrhythms. #3. Cats I Have Owned. #4. Parents I Have Had. #5. Things I Already Know. #6. Making Out. #7. Bubblemath.
8. Favorite Fictional Nerd: Jordan Cochran, from the movie “Real Genius”, as portrayed by Michelle Meyrink (see Jeopardy list item #6 above).
9. 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: That depends on what you mean by “disambiguation”. Are you talking about the musical group? The traditional dessert? The video game? Or the controversial concept overall, as discussed incessantly in theoretical linguistics?