Niche Audiance

I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but it's a theory of mine that Futurama got canceled because it was too smart for the Fox audience. I began to think about this while watching the latest Futurama straight to DVD movie "Into the Wild Green Yonder." I may have been wrong. Slightly.

There's a whole realm of things which are basically nerd lore, but may appear upon cursory observation to be intelligence. One of the key illusions people have about nerds, and that nerds have about themselves, is that we're smarter. I'm not so sure we are. Like any group there are smart nerds, and there are stupid nerds. Nerd, like jock, is just a constellation of interests and personality traits, without any innate merit. It's easy for us, and those around us, to think that we're smarter because one of the key things nerds are fans of is science. Our access to what is effectively scientific trivia allows us to make jokes that seem too smart for the average populace, but it's really just another kind of trivia reference. A quip about some political manuver, or some particular sports figure, may not be any wittier then a "Mind the Keller Gap" sign, but because it's a reference to a scientific phenomenon it's associated with intelligence.

This may seem to be at odds with my pervious writings about nerds being innately prone to expertiese, and that's somethign I still believe, but these seemingly contradictory statements bring up the idea of intelligence differing fom knowledge. I still think that as a subculture nerds are much more inclined to wide bredths of knowledge, but knowledge does not always indicate intelligence.

Also, this entry got wayy off topic from what I was origionally planning to say. Origionally this was going to be a flimsy pretext for me to mention my new favorite extinct animal. The striped biologist taunter.