On this episode of the nerd roundtable, we talk about our favorite non-fictional nerd or geek. So many of our favorite things are based in fiction, we decided to write about something real.
Jason Powers: 
I have two: Well, one is a person and the other is kind of a group of people.
1)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson.Neil is an astrophysicist, and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.
Tyson has been featured on just about every space documentary that the Science Channel or the History Channel has ever produced. He hosted
"NOVA scienceNOW" on PBS for five years and will be hosting a new sequel to
"Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," which is the show that got me interested in space in the first place when it aired back in the 1980s (Well, that and "Star Wars"). Tyson is a frequent guest on "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," "Real Time with Bill Maher," and "Jeopardy!" He hosts a
radio show, and has
testified before congress on the importance of keeping the funding for NASA going and is buddies with
Superman.
He's also a total rock star in space circles. Tyson has this seemingly magical ability to make science easily understandable, and his still intact, childlike wonder at the inner workings of the universe is incredibly contagious. Although people still blame him for demoting Pluto to "dwarf planet" status, even though that was done by a vote, he has managed to embrace his status as the unofficial face of science.
The second is the group behind the YouTube channel
"Geek & Sundry." Launched last April with only three shows, all produced by Felicia Day, the site has ballooned to featuring more than 15 different weekly shows as well as other quirky videos and one-offs.
My personal favorites are Wil Wheaton's
"TableTop" and
"Written by a Kid."Matt Clayton 
After a few days of deliberation about this question, I’ve decided to go with Wil Wheaton. Wheaton first gained international attention by starring in the film “Stand by Me” in 1986. He followed that up with a seven year-run as Wesley Crusher on the TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Recently, Wheaton has performed well during appearances on “The Big Bang Theory” and “Eureka.”
But he’s done something else along the way, he’s figured out how to become a great all-around nerd and remain relevant in the day of the Internet. He can talk about comics, video games and any other geek-related way to spend time. He’s put together a great blog with the tagline
"Wil Wheaton is just this guy, you know?" And he’s published several great books, including “Just a Geek.”
He’s become everything I wanted to be growing up, a nerd who gets paid to be a nerd. That’s why he’s my favorite non-fictional nerd.
Chris Moore 
My favorite geek out there would have to be the comedian Robin Williams. He has indeed proven that over all other geeks he has got every one of them beat. You can peruse a multitude of forums and see people dressed up as their favorite characters from video games, their projects to create such items from them that took the creators hours or even weeks to make and say to themselves and others that their geekdom knows no bounds. Williams, however, has outdone them all.
Robin Williams loves the original "The Legend of Zelda." When his second wife was pregnant with their daughter, they played the game all the time. They loved it so much that they decided to name their daughter after the beloved princess. He calls the name: “magical; as she is.” In an interview with his daughter, Zelda Rae Williams, the two even joke about the names she could have gotten.
“You’re lucky you’re not named Mario, or Luigi, or Samus.” He jokes.
I don’t know if Robin Williams considers himself a geek or not, but in my eyes he has done something that very few out there even dare to do. He didn’t make fascinating art or get full body tattoos as tribute to the game. He said to himself “I love this character so much that I will give my child the namesake of a digital character that I enjoyed saving.” Naming a child after a video game character has hands-down got to be the geekiest thing any person out there can do.
Anna Codutti 
As much as I love the nerds of my generation who're doing amazing things to advance the trend of geek chic, I want to recognize the real-life nerd who opened my mind the most. Dr. Brian Greene, acclaimed author and physics celebrity, made me think huge, deep thoughts about the smallest elements that make up our world.
In 1999, Greene published his first book "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory." He was brave enough to evangelize
string theory and explain it in a way that everyone (well, most likely just bright and/or educated folks) can understand.
Sure, reading the book hurt my brain a bit, and many times I found myself turning pages back instead of forward, but to this day I am so grateful to Greene for turning me on to quantum physics. The idea that differing vibrations are really the building blocks of everything in the universe still gives me shivers. Check out Greene's
PBS special informed by "The Elegant Universe" on the NOVA website.
James Royal 
My vote goes to statistical analysis genius Nate Silver. First off, he's into politics and sports, which endears him to me automatically. Second off, over the past two presidential elections, he's projected who would win in all but one state. He also nailed 35 Senate races in 2008 and 31 of 33 last year. Going into the election, pundits of a certain persuasion kept shouting that Silver was wrong, that he was a biased partisan and that the electoral vote would be much closer than his projections. They were eating those words on election night.
His blog is a must-read for political junkies.
Politics has been his mainstay lately, but he's still well-grounded in sports.
One of his recent blogs looked at the latest Baseball Hall of Fame voting. He also projected
the 2010 World Cup for ESPN and recently
picked the Seahawks and Patriots to reach the Super Bowl.Michael Dambold 
My favorite non-fictional nerd is Michio Kaku.
Michio is a theoretical physicist and futurist who has been seen on multiple television shows, from Science Channel specials to "Good Morning America." In addition to holding degrees from Harvard and Berkeley, he is best known for his work in string field theory and futurist topics such as the possibility of Warp Drive and skirting possible time dilation with interstellar travel.
He also discusses temporal theories and issues such as paradoxes and practical application of temporal displacement. He is an optimistic futurist, which means that he believes humanity has the ability to overcome current environmental and sociological challenges and to pursue interstellar travel as a practicality.
Micah Choquette 
Steve Jobs.
One of the definitions of a nerd is "An intelligent, single-minded expert in a particular technical discipline or profession." I think this describes Jobs perfectly, but not in the way you'd expect. I can't very well say that Jobs was an expert at making computers, because Apple makes a lot of money off of more than computers these days. Neither can I say that they are experts at making phones, software or iPods. Although judging from sales, they're clearly good at it.
The truth is, the expertise of Steve Jobs wasn't at making one product or another, but rather making whatever they were working on extremely well. This trait can be traced down to the first computer that he and Steve Wozniak created in their garage in the '70s. Even though nobody would see it, Jobs made sure that all of the chips in the board looked nice and were spaced exactly the same apart. This carried over to Apple when Jobs returned in 1997 and trimmed down the selection of products to only a few, and put a laser-focus back onto making products that both looked and worked fantastic. You can tell this is the heart of the company as a whole, because Apple's new CEO, Tim Cook, even says that the primary focus of Apple is "to make the best products in the world."
I'll finish up by saying that you can't stop at calling Steve Jobs a nerd or geek. We shouldn't try to compare him to Michael Dell or Bill Gates. Right up there with Jim Henson or Walt Disney, Steve Jobs was a visionary like no other I've seen in my lifetime. It's great to see the company he founded doing so well, but there's an obvious hole in the world that was left with his passion, just waiting for the next Steve Jobs to fill the void.
Do you have a topic you would like the Prairie Nerds to address? Let us know at PrairieNerds@tulsaworld.com
