I just finished a good book recently: "Hackers" by Steven Levy. In it I discovered that it's wholly traditional for programmers not only to avoid smoking but also to kick up a fuss when someone starts smoking near them.
This rather surprised me when I read it, as the book started from the early 60s back when the dangers of smoking weren't really acknowleged and smoking was considered cool.
What surprised me more was my shock a few days later when a fellow geek lit up upon getting outside after a user group meeting. I was shocked because I've been going to this user group for years now and we always go to the pub after the meeting. We also always go to the least smokey area and noone smokes at the table.
This geek, new to this user group, was violating a rule noone's ever mentioned.
I wasn't actually going into the pub that night, so I didn't complain and don't know whether he stayed outside to finish his cigarette (since smoking in pubs is still allowed in Victoria, this is probably unlikely). I presume he was kind enough to finish it away from the dinner table.
But it got me thinking. I can count on one hand the number of people I typically associate with who smoke (as far as I know). Of people I see more often than once a fortnight the number is 0.
I'm not anti-social. I have a very large social group, most of whom are role-players and/or IT geeks and/or Choristers and barely any of them smoke. I was at a wedding recently, and at the reception there was a fire-twirling demonstration outside. Of the 150 or so of us watching noone lit up, even though we'd previously all been inside for the last 3 hours.
The same seems to hold true when I go to other cities and associate with other geeks. The small (8-10 attendees) at the Sydney Perl Mongers meeting I visited in March this year appeared to have no smokers. The cigarettes appeared few and far between at the SAGE-AU conference last year too.
It's almost certainly got a little to do with Australia's active campaign to reduce the number of smokers. This campaign has resulted in disallowing smoking in all Victorian (and a few other states') restaurants and cafes, sports bars, casinos and gaming lounges. It's so much better to not have to step outside of the restaurant for a chance to breathe!
But it would appear from the book, that there might be something else to it too. Perhaps there's something in the wiring of geeks (in general) that makes them uninterested in the effects of nicotine? Or maybe it's just a cooincidence.
I'll keep an open eye at YAPC::{NA,EU}::2005 this time
Heck, I might even call for a show of hands at EU
This campaign has resulted in disallowing smoking in all Victorian (and a few other states') restaurants and cafes, sports bars, casinos and gaming lounges.
Ain't you guys the lucky ones?
Now we have a law (AFAIK) that states that each restaurant/etc may forbid smoking inside it.
<ironic>Yupi. Oh yeah!</ironic>
Re:Now that I think about it...
jmm on 2005-05-11T15:45:27
Ontario has disallowed smoking in public buildings, generally. (There are some grandfathered exceptions. For a while, restaurants were allowed to build a well-ventilated smoking area - they are still allowed to continue to use them for now, but they are being phased out. I suspect that the bingo halls will be the ones that suffer the most when the smoking ban become absolute - they tend to have a bigger smoking area that is packed an d a smaller non-smoking are that is sparsely used.)
So, at YAPC::NA, anyone who wants/needs to smoke will have to go outside, which will mean missing some time at one of the sessions. (Looking at the YAPC::NA program, I find that there are two kinds of session slots - for some of them I want to be able to clone myself to see two sessions at once, for the rest I want to double clone myself to see all three of the alternatives. Fortunately, I don't smoke, so I won't ever feel any urge to miss all of the sessions by going outside.:-)
I don't recall ever seeing anyone at TPM nights stopping for a cigarette during the excursion from the technical meeting to the followup social at the bar across the street.Re:Now that I think about it...
cog on 2005-05-11T16:25:39
I want to double clone myself to see all three of the alternatives.I think that if you'd double clone yourself you'd be able to see all three alternatives and smoke at the same time O:-)
Re:Now that I think about it...
jmm on 2005-05-11T16:53:30
Curse you and curse you again for finding a recursive interpretation of my linear thinking.Re:Now that I think about it...
cog on 2005-05-11T17:00:11
Curse you and curse you againGood... you'd only need to clone yourself once to do that.
Secondly, I've maybe an idea about the low percentage of smoker geeks : smoking is typically a social skill, acquired during social events, parties and so on; things that self-called geeks maybe tend to attend less, preferring smaller focused groups or computer hacking. (Trying to avoid generalization as well...)
Re:and guns
jarich on 2005-05-11T23:51:19
I didn't really mean to say that geeks don't smoke. Even though it's not mentioned in Hackers, I'm sure that there were MIT hackers who smoked away from MIT. I am very aware that there are geeks who smoke, I just don't know many.
What I was marvelling at really is that most of the geeks I come in contact with (in Australia) don't smoke. Geeks who do (in my (Australian) experience) are few and far between. This is wonderful for me as it means that I hardly ever encounter cigarette smoke.
You're probably right about smoking being partly a social skill, however very few of my friends (most who self-identify as geeks) fit the unsocialised geek stereotype. We have great parties (although usually low-alcohol or alcohol-free (it just happens that way)), go out to dinners often and do other things together. Of course our dinner and party conversations can get rather boring to any non-geek visitors as we talk about everything from quantum physics to chaos theory to the latest MMORPG. What we don't do very often is have communal hacking sessions.
The preference for my friends and associates not to smoke almost certainly has a large cultural component. Just as liking guns has a cultural component in other countries. I'd be surprised if the Australian geeks I know had a markedly different range of views on guns than the rest of the Australian population. I think the same might be said about govermental preferences.
