books and friends

I don’t really see the appeal of Twitter – perhaps because I don’t really understand how it works – but occasionally friends send me links to ‘trending topics’.

Yesterday, I got a link to #whatsyourgeekconfession and found this at the top:

I’m surprised that I don’t seem to have mentioned Dunbar’s number here on the blog. The Wikipedia page says Dunbar’s Number is:

suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

In addition:

No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

So who wouldn’t have more books than friends?

Reading further on the Twitter page, I didn’t really think that many of the ‘confessions’ had much to do with geekdom. There again, I might be confusing ‘geek’ with ‘nerd’

I probably have more dictionaries than friends – I don’t think this makes me a language geek – but I think most of them are too old to include either term, so perhaps I should just send you over to XKCD for some thoughts on the distinction between geeks and nerds.

Alternatively – or additionally – I could quote Groucho Marx on books and friends:

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.