The Greatest Geeky Marriage Proposals of All Time

Geeks fall in love and get married just like everyone else, but it may just happen in a geekier way. A person's marriage proposal tends to involve elements of his (or her) interests and personality and geeks are no different except that their interests frequently revolve around technology, science fiction, and video games (et cetera). Geeks also have knowledge and skills that relate to their interests and so they can draw upon diverse talents such as computer programming and video-game playing as well as trivia related to science and nerdy internet memes.

And draw upon these skills they do in the list I have collected of what I think are some of the geekiest proposals. But please, keep in mind that geeky does not mean lame or bad. A geek, to me, is someone, male or female, old or young, who is so dedicated or involved with technology that he or she may appear not to mesh with the mainstream (although the mainstream is trending towards technology). Sometimes this earns geeks the reputation for poor social skills, but while everyone was out partying the geeks below were busy creating!

I have indicated beside each proposal whether it can be carried out remotely (pants optional) or whether (greatly overrated) face-to-face contact is required (pants also optional mandatory). Wikipedia has a nice listing of online proposals, which includes the fair comment that "non-notable people making a geeky wedding proposal is not encyclopaedic". You can also check out other lists such as 10 Geeky Marriage Proposals and Eight Best Techie Marriage Proposals.

"I made 6 freeware apps in the last 4 years. None of them is a financial success."

An experiment being conducted by an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aims to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon's small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a software boss pre-programmed with all the logic required to stitch myriad discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person.

The project is called My Boss is a Robot, and the boffins involved include the team of Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction, as well as freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell.

The idea is simple: computer scientists have already used Mechanical Turk to create a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. The entire process was overseen by software, not humans, and included everything from asking Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) to come up with the topic areas the entry should cover to having them fact-check the writing of previous workers to whom those topics had been assigned.

Based on this success, it seems logical that Turkers might be able to transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism. There are a million reasons this might not work, admit Giles and Campbell, but the exercise is meant to generate insight and discussion, whether or not it succeeds.

TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.

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To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.

WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?

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Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.