San Francisco - With a circuit board corset and a slide rule strapped in a leather holster to her thigh, pasty-faced Ellen Spertus was beaming as she was crowned the "Sexiest Geek Alive".
The 32-year old computer science professor with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was crowned on Wednesday night at a San Jose, California conference of self-proclaimed computer nerds.
She beat eight other male and female finalists at the Broadband 2001 conference for bragging rights as the world's sexiest "geek" - slang for someone who is a technological whiz but a bit slow on the social skills.
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Married to a rocket scientist, Spertus drives an electric car that is hooked up to a Palm Pilot and once sued Kozmo.com, an online delivery service, for sending her junk email, also known as "spam".
| 'Every single thing about her is completely geeky' |
It was a collection of traits the judges found impossible to resist.
"Every single thing about her is completely geeky from her car to her profession to her speech," said contest judge Katharine Mieszkowski. "She was very unselfconscious and didnt even need any geek cliches, she is who she is and she is completely geeky."
In this second-ever geek competition, which garnered over 15 000 entrants from 50 countries, the finalists had to display their less-than-average social skills and genius-level knowledge in technology matters and science fiction trivia.
Spertus triumphantly displayed her geek-adept ways in the talent portion of the contest with a digital cartoon she created on how to count binary code on your fingers, while Cindy Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun played in the background.
The Sexiest Geek Alive said she sped through questions about open source technology but had a harder time with questions about the X-Files, a science fiction conspiracy TV show popular with geeks, since she's not a fan of the show. Still, she came out ahead, she says, because of her unabashed pride "in all things technical".
- Sapa-AFP
| How to count binary code on your fingers |
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