The Top Five (or so) Reasons I am a Dork...

Responding to Johann's tag and Michael's original mandate, I have decided to list the top five or so reasons I am a nerd....even though Johann misspelled my name as "Hauter."

1. I spent last Friday through Saturday at the Mars Society Conference in Boulder, Colorado. I mocked certain obviously ill-considered plans, such as the "sub-$10/lb maglev orbit-injection system." I had to keep myself from asking the lecturer how he planned on coping with the huge G-forces that would result from changing the direction of a multiple-ton sled by 45 degrees in a matter of seconds when it got to the exit ramp (or how it would not just crash through the ramp and explode). I debated with fellow conference-goers about the true significance of establishing a human presence on Mars, asked Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, why he believed commercial space companies wouldn't be able to provide Mars travel in the near future, and ranted about how Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis' Contour Crafting technology (www.contourcrafting.org) will destroy the real estate industry within ten years.
2. Several nights ago I could not sleep, so I turned on the light and jotted down an idea in a notebook. Two hours and thirteen pages later, I had to force myself to go to sleep. The idea: a completely original economic system, based upon modular homes (through contour crafting), standardized appliances, trusted computing, and more which I cannot reveal. Patent pending.
   
3. I am currently reading K. Eric Drexler's 576-page textbook, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation for fun.
4. Look at my Amazon.com wishlist. It speaks for itself. I actually bought several of these books, and was ashamed of the absolutely nerdly glee I felt upon receiving them.
5. I spend a lot of leisure time online, reading articles about new and upcoming technologies, the fledgling commercial spaceflight industry, nanotechnology developments, etc., etc. etc. I think, eat, sleep, and breathe technology, engineering, and science.
   
6. My mad hacker skills impress many. I am writing this post on a laptop that was given up for dead because of its age and broken CD drive; I restored it to better-than-new condition by installing Ubuntu Linux directly over my internet connection. I grok the Open Source movement and make telephone calls for free with Skype. I have developed a device to download every thought to a computer in realtime...just kidding. That would be awesome, though.

Need I say more?

Cheers,
Chris