Word: nerd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
White, who says he was a "chess nerd" in college, has spent the years since his graduation studying developmental psychology, the history of psychology and children's learning and cognitive development...
DAVID GELERNTER, a computer science professor at Yale, was asked to write about Bill Gates. One nerd discussing another? Hardly. Those familiar with Professor Gelernter know him as a wide-ranging (one book topic: the 1939 World's Fair) and engaging writer, who was also a target of the Unabomber's. Those unfamiliar with him will be surprised by his provocative story on the world's best-known businessman...
...early 1990s everybody was pulling for Gates, who proved that even an uber-nerd whom the rest of us beat up in the playground could make it big in the land of opportunity. But the world's richest man made the classic hubristic mistake: building what one newspaper called the "new Xanadu" and bragging about it. Gates' high-tech haven would top even Hearst's epically garish San Simeon as the most grandiose castle in America. But as Hearst once quipped of his estate--which housed, among other things, a large zoo--"Pleasure is what you can afford...
...officer bleating out the song in a steak joint as livestock baa in the background is silly (and desperate) enough to be mildly amusing. Still, it's the sort of scene that you know has been done before--a feeling we seem to get often; a class nerd gets shoved into a locker, carollers disperse before an advancing runaway sleigh, the mistletoe scene, etc. It's a patchwork of cliched moments from other movies or sitcoms--all stapled together into a disjointed Christmas special with absolutely no flow...
...they have ever seen. "He's in the top 1%, not just in terms of ability but in terms of positive attitude, initiative and motivation," says Susan Rocco, who has been teaching math for 24 years. More surprising is that Bismarck is not regarded by schoolmates as a hopeless nerd who hangs only with fellow brainiacs. "He's not a teacher's pet," attests his buddy Ruben Ramirez, a self-described jock. "You'd think with all that work, he'd be boring and uptight, but he's loose and he's real funny." Bismarck, for his part, says...