Maybe it's because I spent too much time on Reddit before finally leaving in disgust, and maybe it's also because I spent all day at the USA Science and Engineering Festival yesterday noticing the differences between those of us who are practicing scientists/engineers/mathematicians or being trained as such and wannabes who couldn't hack it... But I'm beginning to get progressively dissatisfied with some social thing going on here that I can't quite name, and this adulation of John Lennon among other people (Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Louis CK, the list goes on) is a symptom. 'Today's geeks and nerds' doesn't work because STEM folk and 'geeks' and 'nerds' are not identical. There's an age-old debate about what a geek or a nerd is (here's one attempt to quantify it), plenty of those of us in STEM don't identify as either for various reasons, and plenty of people who call themselves geeks and nerds are in things like the humanities or the social sciences or business or law or other things, though admittedly, these things are getting a lot more interdisciplinary. But I did an informal polling yesterday of people I ran into. Everybody who was a scientist or engineer or even a science teacher - any of these things, whether they were in training, practicing or retired - was a well-dressed, put-together individual who exuded, in addition to their love of STEM subjects, confidence, social skills, and a presence free of general awkwardness. Everybody who wasn't? I ran into the 'fedora' stereotypes. I ran into people with not the least bit of fashion sense. I ran into carbon copies of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. I ran into people wearing Big Bang Theory t-shirts with unkempt hair. I ran into this nutty lady who was a business analyst but ran sci-fi conventions in her free time ("I only do my day job to support my hobbies") and was obsessed with 3D printing and whom I had to very often subtly hint to let me participate in the conversation (the Aspergers was strong there). There was one autistic teenager who came very close to causing damage to the exhibit I was helping to run and whose father could not for the life of him control him. There is something rotten in the state of geekdom. Desperately rotten.