闲着没事翻译这篇文章(每天翻译一些):The Nerd Handbook - http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html

Nerd需要项目因为他们不断创造新事物。亘古不变。你注意到他们在晚餐闲聊时间歇性的停顿了吗?那是你所面对的nerd的脑袋正忙于他的项目。
但是这个项目不大可能是nerd的日常工作,因为在他的眼里,工作就是“待在办公室,完成某件事”。我们接下来会花些篇幅来探索下这种表面上注意力不集中的结果,但是现在,这个项目是你的这位nerd正在开发的一件头等大事,虽然我并不知道这是怎样的事,但是你应当知道。
从某个角度来说,你本身就是你的nerd伙伴的“项目”。你被他“瞩目关注”着,因为你就是你的nerd生活中崭新的开发领域。你成为你的nerd朋友的当前“项目”,这也许算是你的福气——恭喜你。但也不要太得意,因为他会更换“项目”,并且这样的事一旦发生,你将摸不着头脑,不知道以往他在你身上的注意都去了哪。幸运的是,这篇手册可能对你有所帮助。
关于性别:方便起见,在本文中,我的nerd原型是一名男性。实际生活中将有许多女性nerd,但本文中所有的这些观察两者都适用。
理解你的nerd和计算机的关系。虽然有些陈词滥调,但是一个nerd的确是为他的计算机所铸就,而你需要理解为什么。
首先,在这颗星球上绝大多数人要么不知道一台计算机如何工作,要么就是看了之后认为计算机“有魔法”。但是nerd们却清楚计算机是如何运作的,他们深谙计算机的工作方式。当你问nerd:“我点了这个,但是过了许久才出来一个东西,你知道哪里有问题?”,他们知道问题所在。在nerd的大脑里有着计算机硬件和软件的模型。当世界上所有其他人看起来是魔法使然的时候,他知道这个魔法是一长串二进制的0,1数字在以惊人的速度流窜过你的屏幕,他甚至知道如何让这些比特流动的更快。
nerd将他的工作,也许是他的生活,完完全全建立在计算机上,我们将会看到,这种亲密的关系已经改变了他的世界观。他将这个世界看成是一个完全可知的系统,只要给他足够的时间和努力。这就是你的nerd所接受的易破灭的幻想,但却是一个令人欣慰的想法,足以让你的nerd愉悦的渡过一整天。但是当这个幻想破灭时,你将会发现…
你的nerd有控制欲的问题。你的nerd生活在一个等宽字体的世界里。当其他人在在一堆眼花缭乱的字体中寻觅合适的字体时,你的nerd已经慎重的选好了一个等宽字体,这是他用来在终端命令行上玩转这个世界的字体,而与此同时,其他人正笨拙的操纵着鼠标。
选择这种字体的原因当然是它的实用性,等宽字体有着已知的宽度,在同一行中的十个字母和其他另外一行的十个字母的宽度是相同的,如此一来,就能把这个世界划分到X/Y坐标分别具有某种含义的一个令人愉悦的网格结构中去。
这些控制欲的问题意味着你的nerd对他周围环境的激烈的变化很敏感,例如旅行,例如工作变化。这些系统重新定义的事件使得你的nerd认识到世界并不总是或者说完全是一个可知的地方,而且直到他重现这个幻想,他将一直感到沮丧,行动没有规律。我在“系统重新定义”事件期间制作了一个难以置信的“短保险丝”,我有可能在某个愚蠢的鸡毛蒜皮的小事中将它烧毁,这是因为…
你的nerd为自己建造了一个“洞穴”。 我曾经在其他地方写过关于“洞穴”的文章,但是这里仍然会提到其中一些基本的问题。“洞穴”是用来能够让你的nerd做他喜爱的事情——折腾他的项目。如果你想要理解你的nerd,那就目不转睛的朝着这个洞穴看吧。他是如何布置这个“洞穴”?他何时打算进去?他在里面待多久?
Each object in the Cave has a particular place and purpose. Even the clutter is well designed. Don’t believe me? Grab that seemingly discarded Mac Mini which has been sitting on the floor for two months and hide it. You’ll have 10 minutes before he’ll come stomping out of the Cave — “Where’s the Mac?”
The Cave is also frustrating you because your impression is that it’s your nerd’s way of checking out, and you are, unfortunately, completely correct. A correctly designed Cave removes your nerd from the physical world and plants him firmly in a virtual one complete with all the toys he needs. Because…
Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. The joy your nerd finds in his project is one of problem solving and discovery. As each part of the project is completed, your nerd receives an adrenaline rush that we’re going to call The High. Every profession has this — the moment when you’ve moved significantly closer to done. In many jobs, it’s easy to discern when progress is being made: “Look, now we have a door”. But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.
There are other ways your nerd can create The High and he does it all the time. It’s another juicy cliché to say that nerds love video games, but that’s not what they love. A video game is just one more system where your nerd’s job is to figure out the rules that define it, which will enable him to beat it. Yeah, we love to stare at games with a bazillion polygons, but we get the same high out of playing Bejeweled, getting our Night Elf to Level 70, or endlessly tinkering with a Rubik’s Cube. This fits nicely with the fact that…
Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.
Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.
This quick wit is only augmented by the fact that…
Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information. Many years ago, I dubbed this behavior NADD, and you should read the article to learn more and to understand what mental muscles your nerd has developed.
How does a nerd watch TV? Probably one of two ways. First, there’s watching TV with you where the two of you sit and watch one show. Then there’s how he watches by himself when he watches three shows at once. It looks insane. You walk into the room and you’re watching your nerd jump between channels every five minutes.
“How can you keep track of anything?”
He keeps track of everything. See, he’s already seen all three of these movies… multiple times. He knows the compelling parts of the arcs and is mentally editing his own versions while watching all three. The basic mental move here is the context switch, and your nerd is the king of the context switch.
The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.
You might suspect that given a world where context is constantly shifting, your nerd can’t focus, and you’d be partially correct. All that multi-tasking isn’t efficient. Your nerd knows very little about a lot. For many topics, his knowledge is an inch deep and four miles wide. He’s comfortable with this fact because he knows that deep knowledge about any topic is a clever keystroke away. See…
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”
And your nerd says, “Cool”.
Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”
You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.
Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear “Cool”, I want you to ask, “What’d I just say?” That awkward grin on your nerd’s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he’s the problem in this particular conversation. This behavior is one of the reasons that…
Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.
The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.
Advanced Nerd Tweakage
If you’re still reading, then I’m thinking that your nerd is worth keeping. Even though he’s apt to vanish for hours, has a strange sense of humor, doesn’t like you touching his stuff, and often doesn’t listen when you’re talking directly at him, he’s a keeper. Go figure.
My advice:
Map the things he’s bad at to the things he loves. You love to travel, but your nerd would prefer to hide in his cave for hours on end chasing The High. You need to convince him of two things. First, you need to convince him that you’re going to do your best to recreate his cave in his new surrounding. You’re going to create a quiet, dark place here he can orient himself and figure out which way the water flushes down the toilet. Traveling internationally? Carve out three days somewhere quiet at the beginning of the trip. Traveling across the US? How about letting him chill on the bed for a half-day before you drag him out to see the Golden Gate Bridge?
Second, and more importantly, you need to remind him about his insatiable appetite for information. You need to appeal to his deep love of discovering new content and help him understand that there may be no greater content fire hose than waking up in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice where you don’t speak a word of Italian.
Make it a project. You might’ve noticed your nerd’s strange relation to food. Does he eat fast? Like really fast? You should know what’s going on here. Food is thrown into the irrelevant bucket because it’s getting in the way of the content. Exercise, too. Thing is, you want your nerd to eat healthily so that he’s here in another thirty years, so how do you change this behavior? You make diet and exercise the project.
For me, exercise became the project ten years ago after a horrible break-up. When the project was no longer the Ex, I dove into exercise every single day of the week. There were charts tracking my workouts, there were graphs tracking my weight, and there was the exercise. Every single day for two years until the day I passed out in a McDonald’s post-workout after not eating for a day. Ok, so time for a new project. Yeah, nerds also have moderation issues. That’s another essay.
Significant nerd behavioral change is only going to happen if your nerd engages in the project heart and soul, otherwise it’s just another thought for the irrelevant bucket.
People are the most interesting content out there. If you’ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does. He can do this because the interaction is via a system he understands — the computer.
Your nerd knows that people are interesting. Just because he can’t look your best friend straight in the eye doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know what makes her tick, but you need to be the social buffer — the translation layer. You need to find one common thread of interest between your nerd and your friend and then he’ll engage because he will have found relevance.
The Next High
As you discovered when you were the project, your nerd’s focus can be deliciously overwhelming, but it will stop. Once a nerd believe he fully knows how a system works, the challenge to understand ceases to exist and he moves on in search of The Next High.
While I don’t know who you are or why in the world you chose a nerd for your companion, I do know that you are not a knowable system. I know that you are messy, just like your nerd. Being your own quirky self will be more than enough to present new and interesting challenges to your nerd.
Besides, it’s just as much a nerd’s job to figure you out and maybe someone somewhere is writing an article about your particular quirks. Good news, he’s probably reading it right now.