How to treat your inner geek

By Matin Durrani

The word “geek” used to be a bit of insult, but to be labelled a geek these days isn’t such a bad thing after all. I think a lot of that’s due to the sheer power and pervasiveness of smartphones, software and IT — in fact, the top definition of “geek” over at Urban Dictionary is “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” I also reckon the huge popularity of TV’s The Big Bang Theory has played its part in the reversal of fortune of the word, with many of us following the stories of Sheldon, Leonard and their geeky physics pals.

One person who clearly finds the word “geek” a selling point is Fabián Rosales Ortega, who’s a researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), which is located on a beautiful hillside campus on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Puebla. I came across Rosales Ortega while travelling through Mexico a couple of months back with my colleague James Dacey. We’d been gathering material for a new Physics World special report on physics in Mexico, which is due out next month, and we decided to visit INAOE as it has some of the country’s top scientists in the field.

As our taxi edged through the narrow streets towards the INAOE campus, I happened to notice a shop with “astrogeek.mx” emblazoned on the storefront as we neared the institute’s main gates. A few enquiries inside INAOE quickly revealed Rosales Ortega as the man behind the enterprise, which sells everything from Star Wars T-shirts to telescopes and Rubik’s cubes to astronomy bedspreads.

As he explains in the video above, the store opened earlier this year and there’s now an online version if you want to order stuff from him over the Internet.

Remember if you want to find out more about physics in Mexico, stay tuned for the Physics World special report, which will be available online from the start of next month.