Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count).
Both these terms are pejorative, but “nerd” was my stigma. At dinner one evening in 3rd grade, I explained to my parents that my friends and I were the nerds, and that we were proud of it. I still remember my father’s horrified reaction. “You’re not a nerd!” he said.
Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense - but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice.
So when I moved to Germany, and found myself having to explain this whole concept to bewildered friends and colleagues, I started to think about the nerd-jock duality a little deeper. What I realized is that, in Germany, engineering is not stigmatized in the same way that it is in the US. It is possible to self-identify as an engineer, even at a very early age, without being a nerd.
Germany is, in fact, a country of engineers. It has to be. Think about it: a cold, cloudy country ranked only 62nd in land mass, 14th in population, and yet in 2008 Germany was #1 in the world in exports by dollars! Yes, ahead of the US and ahead of China. How is that possible? Nerds! Oops, I mean engineers; engineers who design and build high-quality cars, engines, tools, machinery, scientific equipment. This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers.
But what kind of country do you get when you do stigmatize nerds? I’m afraid you get a country of importers. A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school. A country of people who don’t make things.
My 20 year old sister informs me that the “nerd” thing has softened a bit in recent years, but maybe not always for the right reasons. Lots more people spend time with technological devices now, and to be part of the priesthood that creates them, tweaks them, hacks them is more impactful than it used to be.
But one of the reasons “nerd” isn’t such a dirty word now is because some nerds get rich. And that’s the wrong reason to appreciate nerds. Because only very few nerds will get rich, but we need lots of engineers to build our society.
We have a lot of good archetypes in the US. We have the pioneer, the frontiersman, the individualist, the entrepreneur. Let’s keep those. But we can do without the whole nerd/jock thing. It isn’t helping.
), Akhil and Bharath right now at Gran canaria . You can catch them for any evolution queries 
I’m about to start my trip to the 
)
). Other Canonical staff will be around also showing these (and other) technologies, so if interested, just ask.
Also we meet up hackers old and new. 
