ALERT: WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF GEEKS

Growing up in California, being a geek was not something to be proud of. I'm sure that is the same in many parts of our country. Only now is being a 'geek' looked at as being cool, or at least acceptable. 'Geek is Chic' right? Geeks may not be cool in high school or college, but after all of that growing up everyone does after graduation, after seeing the captain of the high school football team and prom queen are back at home living with their parents with 3 kids and working at Denny's, you end up realizing they should have hit the books a little more. Much more than trying to be the most popular kid in school. Because the geeks the 'popular kids' used to make fun of, are now running Fortune 500 companies, inventing, innovating and leading the next generation into the technological future.

But is it too late? Have we as a generation in the United States emphasized 'geekdom' as being so negative, geeks shouldn't even bother? It seems so, as the Pentagon is now claiming we have a geek shortage in the U.S. and it's becoming a National Security risk.

"The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing. According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006."

Where are all the Computer Science majors? Are they all developing or playing video games? I don't know. But it's a scary thought, after seeing geeks, dorks, dweebs, losers and schoolboys being berated day after day during my childhood growing up, to think that we as a nation have put sports, popularity, pop-culture, and fake Hollywood celebrity on a higher pedestal than intelligence. The same intelligence that keeps our country protected from other countries who do emphasize school, education,  computer science and math.

Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

Check out the rest of the article on Wired.com. The comments offer some pretty interesting theories as well including the fact that we outsource just about everything in this country. It's like we're creating our own failure. The fact is, WE NEED MORE GEEKS!