It's kind of like oil companies providing money for research. It might be good in that it provides research funding but there's always a worry that the money from an organization with a particular point of view might skew the science.
Wouldn't it be cool, if there was a way for people and companies to donate money to a publicly run research fund, that any scientist can request funds from?
No strings attached as to what they want to fund - just the ability to make a donation (possibly for a minor tax break?) along with a certificate of the date and size of the donation?
Companies (and industry groups) can still do their own research, but they'll have a way to help fund fundamental research into things that aren't going to result in short term profits. Like CERN or stuff like that.
Think about it. You could build 0.6 LHCs in the for the money poured into one single election. Or 1.5 LHCs for the cost of two weeks worth of sports entertainment. Or 48 LHCs for 1 TARP program. I'm pretty sure that if you were to start building something like that, you'd kick start the US economy like crazy! Seriously.
Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of more funding for fundamental sciences, like what's being done at CERN - had you noticed?;)
A search finding no IR indications of a Dyson Sphere could tell us a few things, but neither of them conclusively, and we won't know which one(s) is correct.
1) There are no Dyson Spheres 2) There are no IR detectable Dyson Spheres (as per your hiding one) 3) There are Dyson Spheres, but their signatures haven't reached us yet. I.e. a star 700 light years away may have just finished a Dyson Sphere, but we won't know until the signature reaches us. 4) There have been Dyson Spheres, but their stars have died, leaving the sphere with no more energy to radiate/having been blown to bits in a nova/having strayed too close to a black hole/something else 5) Some other equally or more likely explanation.
Now, I haven't read the article (surprise), but I'm surprised they aren't checking for solar mass gravitational anomalies with no visible star. It seems to me, that even if you managed to hide the IR signature, or change the configuration of the sphere such that it will radiate dark energy, the sphere and star themselves cannot avoid having an impact on spacetime (i.e. creating a gravity well). As far as I understood, that's part of how we've concluded that 96% of the universe is made up of non-baryonic matter and energy.
It seems to me that this study will really only tell us something interesting about Dyson Sphere civilizations, if they manage to detect one. They may find something completely different and just as meaningful and interesting, but this seems to be a kind of experiment, where a negative finding doesn't help us in any way.
No, sadly I'm not a physicist, but I wouldn't mind studying to become one.
I don't know anything about Dyson, but based on our "civilization" we don't "believe" in infinite growth... we just grow to point where our growth is no longer sustainable.
I'm not sure that's true. If you look at the statistics available, the number of children per woman drops over time as the child survivability increases.
This means that barring something that really fucks up child mortality, we'll likely reach a something very close to a population steady state by about 2050.
Sadly I'm not adept enough at using Gapminder.org to pull up a reference - it's simply what I recall from one of Hans Rosling's many TED talks.
Well, I grew up in a very small town in Denmark, with glose to no homicidal traffic.
My first major accident (the one with the brain damage), happened because I got distracted for just long enough to not notice that some skaters had left a ramp on the bike path, which meant that I ended up going straight over it.
The second major one was when I was riding on a side street, and wanted to get the bike onto the sidewalk for a minor short cut. I was riding a few cm from the roughly 10 cm tall curb, and the front wheel came up nicely. The rear wheel, however, didn't, and instead trailed after it for a few seconds while I was drifting further onto the sidewalk, and eventually I crashed.
Third one was a lot scarier than other two, simply because I had so much lead time. My right shoe lace had come undone and gotten caught in the pedal, tightening the grip with each thrust. When I finally noticed, I was going up hill at low speed, standing to put more force into the pedals, and my right foot was at about 1 or 2 o'clock, when it suddenly couldn't move any further. That gave me about two seconds of panicking as the bike crawled to a halt and finally crashed (no head injury though).
The last major crash I was in where a helmet would have been nice (from a purely feel safe point of view, as again I didn't hit my head), I was riding back from high school (25 km ride). As one often does when riding such distances, I was leaning well forward and simply following the white line (very low traffic road and nothing to block my hearing). All of a sudden I see the FRONT end of a car, while I'm doing 27.6 km/h (the speed on my speedometer is still etched into my brain), and as I find myself flying through the air over the car, my only conscious thought is "DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD, DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD, DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD!" exactly like that (but in Danish), repeated the mantra three times, before I landed right elbow first and did half a somersault, ending up lying on my back, having left a roughly three meter long skid mark on one of the big fat white lines, where my elbow had acted as a makeshift brake pad.
I've have a few other tumbles both before and after this, and every time I've cursed myself for not wearing a helmet.
And the one time I've had a tumble while wearing a helmet, I hit a pot hole while going down hill at about 55 km/h. Scary as hell to be honest. Once I'd calmed myself down and checked for injuries, I took the helmet off to inspect for damaged. One rather large and quite pointy piece of rock had wedged itself in between two of the "bars" that made up the main structure of the helmet. Even without being an expert on head injuries, I'm pretty sure that rock would have either left me a vegetable or a corpse if I hadn't worn the helmet.
Yes, these are simply anecdotes, and as the study points out, most types of accidents that cyclists encounter arent the kind where a helmet will help, not to forget the idiots who do not know how to secure one.
But I've had enough accidents and tumbles to know that I'd rather have helmet hair than corpse hair, but that's a personal choice.
I'm not a racer, but I do want the helmet on my head.
No, I don't think it will save me if a car plows into me, but I've had enough solo accidents involving head injuries, that would have been mitigated by a helmet, that I really, really want to wear one.
And yes, I do in fact have brain damage as a result of one of those accidents.
Parents who tell their kids to wear helmets, but then either don't know or don't care how to wear it properly.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen kids wear helmetsm where the strap either isn't fastened or isn't tightened, to the extent that the helmet will either fall off the kid's head or becomes a SERIOUS strangulation risk in case of an accident.
And then there are the kids riding around with helmets that have obviously already been in at least one crash, meaning that their value even in case of proper fastening and tightening AND the right kind of accident, is essentially zero, if it doesn't become a strangulation risk due to the previous damage.
Frankly I'd rather see kids without helmets that with that kind of helmet culture.
My father, born in 1944, and very good at the mates he's been taught (left school after 7th grade).
It took me about ten minutes to make him grasp the concept of imaginary numbers by using the two,dimensional number line.
Smart. Quick to learn. Refuses to "unlearn".
You see, back in his school days, they were taught that Pi = 22/7. It wasn't an approximation - that was the exact value.
So far I think I've spent close to ten hours, trying every conceivable way I can think of, to demonstrate why 22/7th isn't Pi, but he believes in that particular dogma.
THAT makes him batshit crazy. In a fairly limited scope, but he's still btshit crazy, when he not only believes that Pi is 22/7th, but will actively reject out of hand, proof that goes against his claim, at one point even saying, essentially, just because those guys (the expert mathematicians) say its a different number, that doesn't make my teacher wrong, nor does it mean that I misundertood - 22/7th isn't an approximation of Pi, it IS Pi.
You cannot argue with batshit crazy people, even when they're otherwise extremely lovely people that you know, care about and love!
When he gets into one of those moods, tell him that I have interest in the discussions, and I'll leave. And when he asks why, I tell him exactly why.
Personally I don't want to single out any one religion - major or not.
If you, as an adult, believe in some supernatural being that there is no testable evidence in support of, be it God, Jahwe, Allah, unicorns, angels, demons, Easter bunnies, visiting space aliens, ghosts, fairies or whatever else you can think of, I reserve the right to think of you as being batshit cray.
You may be an all round nice person, hell you may even be quite intelligent, and you're free to believe anything you want - but you're still batshit crazy.
I just picked some of the (in my opinion) crazy things, stereotypes and myths that are prevelant about Mormons, as that is Romney's religion.
Yes, words matter, but I don't think Linus was being crass or was using crass words.
He was using effectual words.
Think about it - if he'd said "very unintelligent" and "very much on the fringe", it wouldn't have the same impact as "fucking moron" and "batshit crazy".
Crass would be saying something like "a fucking moron who deserves to be beaten to death for his stupidity" and "batshit crazy child molesting religious zealot who'd be happy to start world war 3 by baptising the prophet Mohammed into the Mormon faith".
The mask isn't just there to protect the skin from getting a burn. It's there to keep the air from boiling away their eyeballs, singing and burning their lungs etc.
There's a reason that most firefighters are only allowed to be in a building for about 15 minutes. It's not that their oxygen tanks can only carry that much - it's that they'll collapse from dehydration if they stay in there much longer. They quite literally lose a few pounds in that short time span, purely through the act of sweating.
Now, I may be a sceptic and nay-sayer, but I highly doubt that anyone is seriously contemplating this as a replacement for a firefighter's mask - and that includes the people who came up with it.
How does one see through the face paint? I mean through, as you seem to be implying that a kevlar face mask wouldn't have holes for the eyes, and as such, you'd obviously have to cover your eyeballs in this paint as well.
I agree with the latter two, but the first one screams "bad management" to me.
A regular "end of month sprint" is quite simply trying to catch up with stuff, that didn't get done. Things that don't get done is down to bad management.
Yes, there can be rare occasions where an entire department is crashed for a bit (illness, accidents etc), but that's not something that should happen on a regular basis.
IF Mr. Assange can be shown to have *solicited* the data from PFC Manning, then the charge is espionage, which IS a crime in the United States, regardless of where you happen to be sitting when you're collecting your data.
Does that mean that North Korea can demand to have the head of the CIA extradited to stand trial for espionage against North Korea?
I'm pretty sexually liberated (OK, I'm a fucking slut)
A few things: 1) It'd make no sense if you were a celibate slut. 2) Good for you 3) No, seriously - good for you (and hopefully for the ones you fuck as well)
I, for one, never quite understood why there's this stigma about women enjoying sex.
On a side note, I can never really avoid laughing, when some idiot shouts something like "whore" after a woman, who've just turned him down. I mean - he's now loudly informing the world, that not even people who are paid to keep other's company are interested in him. "Look at me - I'm repulsive!"
Sure, but there's also pretty much half a continent between these areas, and as such, they cannot use any EU territory for food without first going through those territories,
In addition seeing as both India and China would have to go through (at a minimum) Pakistan (dumb idea, as they have nukes), Iran and Turkey just to get to the EU border, I think most reasonable (and unreasonable) people would agree, that such an attempt would be pretty much suicidal.
From a logistical point of view, China would be better off trying to take chunks of Russia, and India would be better off expanding east.
And don't forget that China and India border each-other, and I don't think either of them would be too happy to just sit back and do nothing if the other suddenly made a massive military expansion for resources.
Essentially India is blocked by China northwards and Pakistan westwards (both due to nukes). China can't really expand northwards or westwards due to Russia (either directly or through former USSR states), and India and Pakistan both block somewhat to the south.
That pretty much only leaves Southeast Asia, and that's not much less densely populated than China itself.
Why is it that there's this need to "celebrate" the idea that some people are intrinsically worth less than others?
If you're born on that side of an arbitrary line, you're a great guy, if you're born on the other side, you're a piece of scum who deserves to die a painful death.
If you happen to have a different skin pigment than the other people, you're filth and less evolved.
If you believe that this myth is reality you're an idiot, but believing that myth makes you a saint.
If you're this gender and not that one, then you shouldn't do this or that.
Etc. etc. etc. It's all idiocy and lunacy.
Yes, for some reason, there seems to be this constant push to celebrate intolerance.
I think we should just kill all the intolerant people and enjoy a much saner world.
Thinking back to the "good old days", when Anonymous members would be sending nice letters like "snitches get stitches" to people who informed on them.
Your normal, "I'm not meeting with clients" work wear should NOT be dressier than your boss on a typical day
My boss likes to walk around in shorts and a wife beater. Are you seriously suggesting that I should walk around in shorts and topless?
Personally I much prefer a suit (sans tie and jacket when doing regular work).
One of the advantages of my personal preference is that I can be dragged along to an unexpected meeting with about two minutes notice (enough time to save everything, lock the workstation and tie my tie) without looking like scum and scaring people away (which, honestly, a lot of us do - myself included when I'm on vacation).
And it's not exactly difficult to mark yourself as a geek/nerd, even if you're in a suit and tie. Just have a look around ThinkGeek for ties, tie clips, cuff links, watches etc.
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Wouldn't it be cool, if there was a way for people and companies to donate money to a publicly run research fund, that any scientist can request funds from?
No strings attached as to what they want to fund - just the ability to make a donation (possibly for a minor tax break?) along with a certificate of the date and size of the donation?
Companies (and industry groups) can still do their own research, but they'll have a way to help fund fundamental research into things that aren't going to result in short term profits. Like CERN or stuff like that.
Btw, just to put CERN into perspective, money wise.
CERN's 2012 budget: 970 million Euro
Expected cost of US 2012 presidential election: 4.6 billion Euro
Total budget of the LHC: 7.5 billion Euro
2012 Summer Olympics budget: 11.5 billion Euro
Authorized TARP expenditure: 360 billion Euro
Think about it.
You could build 0.6 LHCs in the for the money poured into one single election.
Or 1.5 LHCs for the cost of two weeks worth of sports entertainment.
Or 48 LHCs for 1 TARP program. I'm pretty sure that if you were to start building something like that, you'd kick start the US economy like crazy! Seriously.
Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of more funding for fundamental sciences, like what's being done at CERN - had you noticed? ;)
A search finding no IR indications of a Dyson Sphere could tell us a few things, but neither of them conclusively, and we won't know which one(s) is correct.
1) There are no Dyson Spheres
2) There are no IR detectable Dyson Spheres (as per your hiding one)
3) There are Dyson Spheres, but their signatures haven't reached us yet. I.e. a star 700 light years away may have just finished a Dyson Sphere, but we won't know until the signature reaches us.
4) There have been Dyson Spheres, but their stars have died, leaving the sphere with no more energy to radiate/having been blown to bits in a nova/having strayed too close to a black hole/something else
5) Some other equally or more likely explanation.
Now, I haven't read the article (surprise), but I'm surprised they aren't checking for solar mass gravitational anomalies with no visible star. It seems to me, that even if you managed to hide the IR signature, or change the configuration of the sphere such that it will radiate dark energy, the sphere and star themselves cannot avoid having an impact on spacetime (i.e. creating a gravity well). As far as I understood, that's part of how we've concluded that 96% of the universe is made up of non-baryonic matter and energy.
It seems to me that this study will really only tell us something interesting about Dyson Sphere civilizations, if they manage to detect one. They may find something completely different and just as meaningful and interesting, but this seems to be a kind of experiment, where a negative finding doesn't help us in any way.
No, sadly I'm not a physicist, but I wouldn't mind studying to become one.
I'm not sure that's true. If you look at the statistics available, the number of children per woman drops over time as the child survivability increases.
This means that barring something that really fucks up child mortality, we'll likely reach a something very close to a population steady state by about 2050.
Sadly I'm not adept enough at using Gapminder.org to pull up a reference - it's simply what I recall from one of Hans Rosling's many TED talks.
So, which one was it then? Was it one of these that you can find on Wikipedia?
Well, I grew up in a very small town in Denmark, with glose to no homicidal traffic.
My first major accident (the one with the brain damage), happened because I got distracted for just long enough to not notice that some skaters had left a ramp on the bike path, which meant that I ended up going straight over it.
The second major one was when I was riding on a side street, and wanted to get the bike onto the sidewalk for a minor short cut. I was riding a few cm from the roughly 10 cm tall curb, and the front wheel came up nicely. The rear wheel, however, didn't, and instead trailed after it for a few seconds while I was drifting further onto the sidewalk, and eventually I crashed.
Third one was a lot scarier than other two, simply because I had so much lead time. My right shoe lace had come undone and gotten caught in the pedal, tightening the grip with each thrust. When I finally noticed, I was going up hill at low speed, standing to put more force into the pedals, and my right foot was at about 1 or 2 o'clock, when it suddenly couldn't move any further. That gave me about two seconds of panicking as the bike crawled to a halt and finally crashed (no head injury though).
The last major crash I was in where a helmet would have been nice (from a purely feel safe point of view, as again I didn't hit my head), I was riding back from high school (25 km ride). As one often does when riding such distances, I was leaning well forward and simply following the white line (very low traffic road and nothing to block my hearing). All of a sudden I see the FRONT end of a car, while I'm doing 27.6 km/h (the speed on my speedometer is still etched into my brain), and as I find myself flying through the air over the car, my only conscious thought is "DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD, DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD, DON'T HIT YOUR HEAD!" exactly like that (but in Danish), repeated the mantra three times, before I landed right elbow first and did half a somersault, ending up lying on my back, having left a roughly three meter long skid mark on one of the big fat white lines, where my elbow had acted as a makeshift brake pad.
I've have a few other tumbles both before and after this, and every time I've cursed myself for not wearing a helmet.
And the one time I've had a tumble while wearing a helmet, I hit a pot hole while going down hill at about 55 km/h. Scary as hell to be honest. Once I'd calmed myself down and checked for injuries, I took the helmet off to inspect for damaged. One rather large and quite pointy piece of rock had wedged itself in between two of the "bars" that made up the main structure of the helmet. Even without being an expert on head injuries, I'm pretty sure that rock would have either left me a vegetable or a corpse if I hadn't worn the helmet.
Yes, these are simply anecdotes, and as the study points out, most types of accidents that cyclists encounter arent the kind where a helmet will help, not to forget the idiots who do not know how to secure one.
But I've had enough accidents and tumbles to know that I'd rather have helmet hair than corpse hair, but that's a personal choice.
I'm not a racer, but I do want the helmet on my head.
No, I don't think it will save me if a car plows into me, but I've had enough solo accidents involving head injuries, that would have been mitigated by a helmet, that I really, really want to wear one.
And yes, I do in fact have brain damage as a result of one of those accidents.
Parents who tell their kids to wear helmets, but then either don't know or don't care how to wear it properly.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen kids wear helmetsm where the strap either isn't fastened or isn't tightened, to the extent that the helmet will either fall off the kid's head or becomes a SERIOUS strangulation risk in case of an accident.
And then there are the kids riding around with helmets that have obviously already been in at least one crash, meaning that their value even in case of proper fastening and tightening AND the right kind of accident, is essentially zero, if it doesn't become a strangulation risk due to the previous damage.
Frankly I'd rather see kids without helmets that with that kind of helmet culture.
I'll give you a less problematic example, Pi.
My father, born in 1944, and very good at the mates he's been taught (left school after 7th grade).
It took me about ten minutes to make him grasp the concept of imaginary numbers by using the two,dimensional number line.
Smart. Quick to learn. Refuses to "unlearn".
You see, back in his school days, they were taught that Pi = 22/7. It wasn't an approximation - that was the exact value.
So far I think I've spent close to ten hours, trying every conceivable way I can think of, to demonstrate why 22/7th isn't Pi, but he believes in that particular dogma.
THAT makes him batshit crazy. In a fairly limited scope, but he's still btshit crazy, when he not only believes that Pi is 22/7th, but will actively reject out of hand, proof that goes against his claim, at one point even saying, essentially, just because those guys (the expert mathematicians) say its a different number, that doesn't make my teacher wrong, nor does it mean that I misundertood - 22/7th isn't an approximation of Pi, it IS Pi.
You cannot argue with batshit crazy people, even when they're otherwise extremely lovely people that you know, care about and love!
When he gets into one of those moods, tell him that I have interest in the discussions, and I'll leave. And when he asks why, I tell him exactly why.
Personally I don't want to single out any one religion - major or not.
If you, as an adult, believe in some supernatural being that there is no testable evidence in support of, be it God, Jahwe, Allah, unicorns, angels, demons, Easter bunnies, visiting space aliens, ghosts, fairies or whatever else you can think of, I reserve the right to think of you as being batshit cray.
You may be an all round nice person, hell you may even be quite intelligent, and you're free to believe anything you want - but you're still batshit crazy.
I just picked some of the (in my opinion) crazy things, stereotypes and myths that are prevelant about Mormons, as that is Romney's religion.
Yes, words matter, but I don't think Linus was being crass or was using crass words.
He was using effectual words.
Think about it - if he'd said "very unintelligent" and "very much on the fringe", it wouldn't have the same impact as "fucking moron" and "batshit crazy".
Crass would be saying something like "a fucking moron who deserves to be beaten to death for his stupidity" and "batshit crazy child molesting religious zealot who'd be happy to start world war 3 by baptising the prophet Mohammed into the Mormon faith".
Personally I would like do donate to a bounty on Pakistani Railway Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour.
I don't want him dead or injured.
I just want to see a ... Let's say three minute video wherein his naked ass is spanked repeatedly with pig-skin sandals covered in dog shit.
Maybe with a nicely styled chant along the lines of "this is what happens to intolerant hate mongers".
And make absolutely sure that there can be no doubt as to the identity of the person being spanked.
Then why not back surgically removing the appendix from everyone?
It would soon become a routine operation, possibly one that could done with keyhole surgery in less than an hour and you'd be sent home the same day.
Once that's become a well established routine, make it a regular part of the check-ups babies are given.
Hey presto - no more incidents of appendicitis.
I do hope you're joking.
The mask isn't just there to protect the skin from getting a burn. It's there to keep the air from boiling away their eyeballs, singing and burning their lungs etc.
There's a reason that most firefighters are only allowed to be in a building for about 15 minutes. It's not that their oxygen tanks can only carry that much - it's that they'll collapse from dehydration if they stay in there much longer. They quite literally lose a few pounds in that short time span, purely through the act of sweating.
Now, I may be a sceptic and nay-sayer, but I highly doubt that anyone is seriously contemplating this as a replacement for a firefighter's mask - and that includes the people who came up with it.
You do make a good point.
How does one see through the face paint? I mean through, as you seem to be implying that a kevlar face mask wouldn't have holes for the eyes, and as such, you'd obviously have to cover your eyeballs in this paint as well.
I really don't want to know how homoeopaths prepare a weak cure for diarrhoea ...
I agree with the latter two, but the first one screams "bad management" to me.
A regular "end of month sprint" is quite simply trying to catch up with stuff, that didn't get done. Things that don't get done is down to bad management.
Yes, there can be rare occasions where an entire department is crashed for a bit (illness, accidents etc), but that's not something that should happen on a regular basis.
Does that mean that North Korea can demand to have the head of the CIA extradited to stand trial for espionage against North Korea?
A few things:
1) It'd make no sense if you were a celibate slut.
2) Good for you
3) No, seriously - good for you (and hopefully for the ones you fuck as well)
I, for one, never quite understood why there's this stigma about women enjoying sex.
On a side note, I can never really avoid laughing, when some idiot shouts something like "whore" after a woman, who've just turned him down. I mean - he's now loudly informing the world, that not even people who are paid to keep other's company are interested in him. "Look at me - I'm repulsive!"
You surely meant to say "50 Mbit", I guess.
Sure, but there's also pretty much half a continent between these areas, and as such, they cannot use any EU territory for food without first going through those territories,
In addition seeing as both India and China would have to go through (at a minimum) Pakistan (dumb idea, as they have nukes), Iran and Turkey just to get to the EU border, I think most reasonable (and unreasonable) people would agree, that such an attempt would be pretty much suicidal.
From a logistical point of view, China would be better off trying to take chunks of Russia, and India would be better off expanding east.
And don't forget that China and India border each-other, and I don't think either of them would be too happy to just sit back and do nothing if the other suddenly made a massive military expansion for resources.
Essentially India is blocked by China northwards and Pakistan westwards (both due to nukes). China can't really expand northwards or westwards due to Russia (either directly or through former USSR states), and India and Pakistan both block somewhat to the south.
That pretty much only leaves Southeast Asia, and that's not much less densely populated than China itself.
They also make food a LOT safer.
You really don't have to go far back in history to find horrible examples of western countries suffering from unsafe foods.
I think it's way better than MosqMuffin myself ...
Seriously.
Why is it that there's this need to "celebrate" the idea that some people are intrinsically worth less than others?
If you're born on that side of an arbitrary line, you're a great guy, if you're born on the other side, you're a piece of scum who deserves to die a painful death.
If you happen to have a different skin pigment than the other people, you're filth and less evolved.
If you believe that this myth is reality you're an idiot, but believing that myth makes you a saint.
If you're this gender and not that one, then you shouldn't do this or that.
Etc. etc. etc. It's all idiocy and lunacy.
Yes, for some reason, there seems to be this constant push to celebrate intolerance.
I think we should just kill all the intolerant people and enjoy a much saner world.
Thinking back to the "good old days", when Anonymous members would be sending nice letters like "snitches get stitches" to people who informed on them.
My boss likes to walk around in shorts and a wife beater. Are you seriously suggesting that I should walk around in shorts and topless?
Personally I much prefer a suit (sans tie and jacket when doing regular work).
One of the advantages of my personal preference is that I can be dragged along to an unexpected meeting with about two minutes notice (enough time to save everything, lock the workstation and tie my tie) without looking like scum and scaring people away (which, honestly, a lot of us do - myself included when I'm on vacation).
And it's not exactly difficult to mark yourself as a geek/nerd, even if you're in a suit and tie. Just have a look around ThinkGeek for ties, tie clips, cuff links, watches etc.