by RAF KATIGBAK

It’s official: Canadian kids are the nerdiest motherfuckers on the planet. Last week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where 1,400 students representing more than 40 countries went head to head presenting their scientific who-zi-whats-its and wing-a-ma-jiggers to a panel of world-class science, engineering and industry professionals, Team Canada made out like Orion space pirate frigates returning to the Rigel system (which is more than I can say for our hockey team).

Out of the over 70 per cent of Canadian students who won prizes at the meet, 16-year old Adrian Veres bestowed Montreal with the honour of nerdiest city in Canada when he took home $10,000 (U.S.) for developing a biosensor that detects the presence of infectious diseases in bodily fluids. Brossard’s Kartik Madiraju picked up a three-grand first-place award in environmental science for his project on how bacteria can generate electricity. And nine others took home a total of over $15,000 (U.S.).

Hold up. Does this frighten anyone else besides me? Not just that the idea of 1,400 adolescent braniacs running around is creepy in that Village of the Damned kind of way, but with Canadian universities finding it tougher to entice overseas students, should we really be pimping out the fact that we are the dweebiest nation in the world? Isn’t it enough that we subject the rest of the world to Ben Mulroney?

Why aren’t we showing off Canada’s sexier side? What about Veres himself; shouldn’t a 16-year-old male high school student be more concerned with bodily fluids of an altogether different sort? Will that generation of leaders grow up to be a legion of straight-laced brainiacs whose parliamentary debates centre around which was the best Star Trek series of all time (TNG, hands down)?

To be truthful, I’m not actually worried about the future. Canadians have been and always will be nerds. And Canada doesn’t need to present itself as sexier either. We don’t need to spice up our image by redefining the term “Canadian beaver,” nor do I think we need to put together a series of naked R.C.M.P. calendars called R.U.M.P.s. In fact, all of those things are inherently un-Canadian; we know we’re sexy and that we rule, we just don’t need to smack people over the head with it.

The real reason I’m upset is that, while it may come as a shock to you, I was a teenage nerd. At this point you’re probably thinking: how could a short awkward Asian with home-cut hair, coke bottle glasses and a religious dedication to Square One TV be so slighted as a youth?

Well, I still wake up screaming in a cold sweat every now and then wondering the same thing. While it never got to the point where I wore Ferengi head gear to the prom, my high school yearbook did nominate me for weirdest dressed (one-upped by the winner Earl Faronda, whose premature adoption of phat pants in the early ’90s miraculously eked out the cowboy boots, Huxtable-era Gordon Gartrelle shirt and bolo tie ensemble I thought was a shoo- in—curse you, Faronda!).

But being a nerd seemed easy in high school. All you had to do was be into comics, video games or computers. Now, X-Men is a blockbuster franchise, video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and every 14-year-old can text, sms, chat on their cell, surf the Web and build you a Web site at the same time.

Guys like Veres, these supernerds, are taking it up a notch by doing things like developing technology that can detect even small amounts of infectious disease in any bodily fluid, such as blood. Creating something that is not only more cost-effective but quicker than existing technology.

As a reformed geek, I empathise with Veres’s lesser nerds compatriots at Collège Jean-de-Brebeuf—what do they have to do to get nerd status? Build a freakin’ time machine? Not likely, because even though some theories of quantum mechanics permit the possibility of backwards movement in time, the physical constraints that exist through quantum probability behaviour most likely would act to protect the present from changes in the past (duh). Besides, even if you did manage to stop him from winning, it a) wouldn’t even happen in this universe anyway, and b) wouldn’t change the fact that you don’t have a girlfriend.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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