"Do you even know what URL means?"

"They love my beautiful mind... I am ugly, but they’re attracted to the brains. I’m a rock star among geeks, wonks and nerds."

Said the economist, noting that his parties are great because of "fun people and beautiful girls" and "I look for 10 girls to one guy."

But you need to be more careful about your bragging, apparently, because now the Department of Buildings is coming after his giant rooftop hot tub, which he's ordered to remove, because he didn't seek approval.

Lesson: First, seek approval from the government. Then, seek approval from fun people and beautiful girls.

Paraphrase of the lesson: The government wants to be your beautiful girl.

ADDED: "10 girls to one guy" = "Surf City" x 5. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Crunchy Frog improves on my bad math:

10 girls for every guy = Surf City in binary.

"We predicted a moment like this. If the information were attacked it would immediately spread."

"The unintended consequence is it’s become incredibly demanded information — it’s everywhere."

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, “It’s something that obviously is a concern.”

To Wilson, they merely prove his point: The “great thinkers in nanny state-ism” will do anything to maintain power.

He also bristles when gun victims — like the families of the Sandy Hook school victims — lobby government.

“I’m unhappy they were able to leverage their victimhood for the reduction of liberties of their fellow citizens,” Wilson said.

“They’re playing small ball,” added Wilson. “We’re playing a much bigger game.”

He’s such a passionate believer in his plastic gun that he laughs at the notion of someone killing him with it.

“That would be so ironic,” he said. “Even in death, it would be hilarious.”

Laughing at death, laughing at the government, it's 3D-printed-gun designer Cody Wilson — who's also a law student (at the University of Texas).

Wilson has not merely designed a 3D-printable gun, he's 3D-printed himself as a character on the national scene. Nice creative work, Wilson!

Now, will he become a lawyer?

Another law student in the news is John Cochran, who just won $1 million on "Survivor." He too designed himself as a fabulous character:

The first time, I went into [the game] so anxious that people are going to perceive me as a nerd, a socially awkward freak. And I'm formally still the same socially awkward, freaky, nerd guy. But the difference is that instead of those eccentricities and quirks being a source of embarrassment or anxiety for me, I've just accepted it as a reality of my existence... And that's immensely liberating because I got to focus on the game this time instead of how I'm perceived, which ruined my game the first time. Being able to focus on the game I've loved for half my life was a dream come true.

Nice creative work, Cochran! Cochran was asked — by Jeff Probst — whether he was going to go on to be a lawyer, and he said he didn't think so. He said he'd like to be a writer. He said he wrote a paper on the "Survivor" jury system when he was at Harvard, so I expect some cool books analyzing "Survivor."

"The idea that having a capacity for empathy, for expressing and understanding emotion, is part of being a normal male..."

"... is fundamentally contemporary and a way of asking that men learn a traditionally feminine virtue. When men were in an unquestioned position of control in the economy — when the bedrock of the nuclear family was a single male wage, a flow of income largely unavailable to women — there was less force compelling men to make themselves attractive mates through understanding the feelings of others and expressing affection. The Asperger’s population is 90 percent male; it’s likely that one reason Asperger’s got 'discovered' and then 'boomed' is that the rest of us have been slowly revising our expectations of men."

Benjamin Nugent, "American Nerd: The Story of My People." (Kindle Locations 1840-1845).

Delving deeply into the question whether the Chinese have a word for "nerd."

You remember the discussion after NYT columnist David Brooks asserted that the Chinese don't have a word for "nerd." Victor Mair at Language Log has a lot to say on the subject:

First of all, we have to know what "nerd" itself means.  It doesn't just signify a bookish or pedantic person, but rather someone who is socially inept or square (try finding an exactly equivalent word for that in Chinese!), perhaps, but not necessarily, because of a consuming commitment to intellectual or technical pursuits....

I asked about thirty native speakers of various Sinitic languages and topolects how they would say "nerd" in Chinese.  Around half of them flat out said that you cannot say "nerd" in Chinese, but must borrow the English word.  Roughly another quarter mentioned shūdāizi ("bookworm"), or variants thereof, while another quarter listed all sorts of colorful terms meaning — more or less — "fool; blockhead; dolt; dunce; dullard; simpleton; numskull"; etc.), none of which are really comparable to "nerd".  I'll just list a few of the more interesting Chinese terms of the latter sort...

Much more at the link, including the awareness among native Chinese speakers of the nerd/geek distinction (and familiarity with this Venn diagram).

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

For a subtler definition of nerd see this Venn diagram.