NERDS

Strange and nerdy times we live in.  If you don't believe me, here are the top 20 signs you might have missed:

1. People camp out overnight to get Apple products as soon as they are put on sale, and others pay other people to do that for them.

2. Fast Company names Nate Silver, a statistician, as the most creative person in business.

3. The Big Bang Theory, a show about Physicists, enters it's 7th season, after being the highest-rated comedy on US TV in the 2012-2013 season.

4. Four out of the top five most watched shows in the USA are either Nerdy (NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles - Law Enforcement and Counterintelligence in the Navy) or Very Nerdy (Big Bang Theory, and Person of Interest, a drama about a machine that analyses big data to predict who's going to die in a violent crime).  Sunday Night Football at #2 is the only non-nerdy show in the top 5.

5. In 2011, Barack Obama invites some of the most influential people in the tech industry to dinner.  These include the (then) CEO's of Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Twitter, Oracle, and NetFlix; the president of Stanford University; the chairman and former CEO of Genentec; and the managing partner and founder of Venture Capital fund the Westly Group.  The New York Magazine reports it in a piece headlined "The World's Most Powerful Man Meets President Obama".  They were referring to Mark Zuckerberg...

6. ...who was Time Magazine's person of the year 2010.

7. The top grossing movie this year so far is Iron Man 3, which has the double nerd distinction of being based on a comic book and having the main character modelled on Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley Tech Founder.

8. In a life-imitates-art-imitates-life twist, Musk is building real life technology used by the fictional character he was the inspiration for.  (Source: His Twitter)

We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2013

Like in Iron Man? RT @elonmusk: Will post video of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & immediately printing in titanium

— Jon Favreau (@Jon_Favreau) August 24, 2013

@Jon_Favreau Yup. We saw it in the movie and made it real. Good idea!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2013

9. The top grossing movie for each year since 1999 has either been based on a comic book; is a Pixar, Harry Potter, Pirate, or Star Wars movie; or is set on another planet (Avatar).

10. The odds-on favourite for the top-grossing movie of 2014 is the Godzilla remake. (source)

11. Google is a verb now.

12. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple gets a(nother) bio-pic.

13. This follows the success of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network about Facebook.  

14. Sorkin, king of nerd pop culture, also wrote the screenplays for Moneyball, a film about analytics in baseball, and The Newsroom, a TV series about - perhaps not surprisingly - a newsroom

15. Speaking of Jobs, the JOBS Act is passed into legislation in the USA.  It isn't named after Steve Jobs, but may as well have been - it stands for Jumpstart Our Business Startups, and at the heart of it, makes it easier for "moms and dads" to invest in startups via crowdfunding.

16. Apple has the highest market cap of any company in the world.  Google and Microsoft are in the top 10.

17. Twitter and Facebook are cited by many as key tools in the Arab Spring.  Vodafone is named as a key to inspiration in the Arab Spring by... well, only by Vodafone themselves actually.

18. Harvard Business Review dedicates an entire edition to Big Data (It's THE management revolution, don't you know?)

19. Eric Schmidt, (former) CEO at Google, famously uses the line "In God we trust, all others bring data" (source).

20. This week British Airways set up a seriously nerdy billboard advertising campaign, and Both Virgin America and Air New Zealand (here and here) nerdified their in-flight safety videos earlier this year.

The nerds are taking over everything, and HR isn't exempt... more on that next post.  If you have any more examples of the nerdification of nearly everything, please share in the comments!

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