Long live the nerd! Computer engineers played by actors fawn over Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of USB, in this hilarious commercial for Intel.

T-minus 18 days until school starts again. Man, I need a job. Otherwise I spend all day, as I have the past few, reading. Thoreau usually tops my list, but this time it’s been shorter bursts of stuff like Orion magazine (cover to cover, of course).

What’s that, you say? Certainly Orion hasn’t taken up the 30 hours of free time I’ve had in the past five days? You’re right. I have a new obsession. (Journalists get paid to develop short-term obsessions and then tell everyone else about how cool this thing is. I love my career path.)

Last month it was underground dinners. This month I think I’ve fallen into the world of nerdiness. Enter xkcd.

The webcomic xkcd unites a group of nerds around an examination of their culture and ours, which overlap sometimes. It brings together hackers, physicists, mathematicians, hobby internet nerds (irc, wikipedia), software developers, and others whose professions or hobbies involve the sciences or who can appreciate them.

That’s a big group, of which I’m only a part because of the catch-all at the end.

(However, I did develop mIRC chatrooms as a fourth grader. “Kids 97” and, once the year changed, “Kids 98,” were my creation, in case you remember them.)

But xkcd is only the start. I’ve started to learn about several facets of nerd culture, and I’ll be sharing them with you over the coming days.

For now, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite xkcd comics. There are 600-some to date, and I’ve picked out roughly ten percent of them for you. I’ve left out the ones that deal with hardcore programming stuff because neither you or I understand those. I’ve also tended toward the ones that have to do with romantic relationships. I think the author, Randall Munroe, is at his funniest and most culturally in-touch there.

(Also I secretly hope for a girlfriend as nerdy as he has one day.)

http://xkcd.com/20
http://xkcd.com/37
http://xkcd.com/44
http://xkcd.com/59
http://xkcd.com/60
http://xkcd.com/69
http://xkcd.com/75
http://xkcd.com/77
http://xkcd.com/90
http://xkcd.com/96
http://xkcd.com/101
http://xkcd.com/112
http://xkcd.com/116
http://xkcd.com/125
http://xkcd.com/150
http://xkcd.com/162
http://xkcd.com/163
http://xkcd.com/173
http://xkcd.com/201
http://xkcd.com/203
http://xkcd.com/219
http://xkcd.com/235
http://xkcd.com/236
http://xkcd.com/250
http://xkcd.com/267
http://xkcd.com/268
http://xkcd.com/271
http://xkcd.com/283
http://xkcd.com/289
http://xkcd.com/298
http://xkcd.com/308
http://xkcd.com/316
http://xkcd.com/352
http://xkcd.com/356
http://xkcd.com/358
http://xkcd.com/359
http://xkcd.com/388
http://xkcd.com/430
http://xkcd.com/440
http://xkcd.com/443
http://xkcd.com/470
http://xkcd.com/474
http://xkcd.com/492
http://xkcd.com/499
http://xkcd.com/513
http://xkcd.com/519
http://xkcd.com/525
http://xkcd.com/528
http://xkcd.com/530
http://xkcd.com/535
http://xkcd.com/537
http://xkcd.com/539
http://xkcd.com/563
http://xkcd.com/564
http://xkcd.com/572
http://xkcd.com/589
http://xkcd.com/604
http://xkcd.com/610
http://xkcd.com/630
http://xkcd.com/632
http://xkcd.com/642