Transferred from my old blog: Striving to new heights of geekdom

October 4, 2004

According to tests, I am not a super geek. I am in fact only 15.58185 % geek. I know several other people who took this test, and I scored the lowest on the geek scale. Interesting fact: Bryan is twice as geeky as me at 33.33333 %.

Today though, I have increased my level of geekiness to 15.77909 % (I checked.). How? I went out of my way to buy a set of first cover stamps. The stamps were released today to celebrate two of Canada's Nobel Laureates, both of whom were awarded their prizes in the field of chemistry (geeky).

The first was Gerhard Herzburg, who won the Nobel prize in 1971, and worked in Ottawa. I don't know anything about him aside from that.

The second was Michael Smith, who was awarded his Nobel prize in 1993 for his work on site-directed mutagenesis in DNA, leading the way for advances in gene therapy as cancer treatment. He did this work at UBC, and was the founder of the department in which I now work, The Biotechnology Laboratory. In fact, I believe he may have once run the lab that my research group is currently using, because a lot of the old glassware and equipment in here, has the initials M.S. on it. The 'Michael Smith Laboratories' building at UBC is almost finished, and we will be moving to a lab in there in the next few weeks.

That's why I bought first cover stamps. I don't see myself starting a stamp collection though, or going out of my way to purchase the entire collection of Nobel Laureate stamps, if they are released.