Lighthearted Nerdery

Amidst the flurry of depressingly divided, emotional articles about IE8 breaking the browser market with version targeting, it was nice to see some altruistic, informative, and just-plain-fun news in my RSS reads this week:

• Sam Brown announced that Sidepath is now FREE!
• Andy Budd began a not-to-be-missed series on Design Artefacts
• Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero released their creative Twitter app: Strawpoll

Of course, there was a lot of other great posts, podcasts and articles this week, but in trying to keep away from the M$ bashing and ensuing flame-wars, I found a few good laughs in the recent Photo Basement post: 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments. As I scrolled, laughed, pointed, scrolled and laughed again, I couldn’t help but think how similarly nerdy and awkward I was myself at that age and remembered a particular science fair project I did back in my junior high days.

The title of my experiment was What are the odds of extracting a blue M&M from a “Fun Size” bag of M&Ms? I originally wanted to do a project about BBS games, but this was a much hotter topic in 1995 as the blue M&M had just been introduced. Somehow, my piddly, bean counting project won the 1st place prize in the math category; this could be because there were only 3 math experiments that year. It was also very well received by my classmates; mostly because I let them eat the candies they helped me count. And of course it was ground-breaking statistical research! While I never published a paper on my findings, I remember that there were way more brown M&Ms than any other color, and I managed to find this flattering image in an old box of photos.

A few interesting things to note in the photo above.

• It took longer to staple all those empty bags to my board than it did to plug my numbers into Excel.
• I designed that masthead for the “School Zone” section of our local newspaper as part of a design competition the previous year.
• Yes, that’s a genuine Ironman Triathalon watch on my arm there.
• See the check on the ribbon? I apparently won some money for getting 1st place. I’m not sure, but I probably used that extra moola to buy a hackey sack or some sweet Airwalks.
• Über. Nerd.

So, there. I’ve shared with you a little glimpse into my childhood. Does anybody else have any embarrassing childhood pictures to post?