Fire Alarm Companies

The geek world is somewhere thrive socially excluded. We 're interested in how smart people - not who they sleep

Tim Cook 's appointment as head of Apple is the official "gay disabled" sign above the door tech industry - but the truth is that they never unwelcome here. They love us! Well, actually, they 're totally ambivalent to us. For in the geek world, have the normal rules of society do not apply, for the simple reason that they don 't make sense.

Geeks love rules, especially the kinds of programming geeks (like me) to take over the world one line of code at a time. But we like the rules based on logic, or at least some kind of pragmatic interpretation of the specific results on real experiments (in the non-geek world as common sense) is based. There is no logical rule connects sexuality to untangle the ability to model the world as equations or a sequence of user actions. So it is a non-factor. Noise. Safely ignored.

For many geeks, this is largely how the world falls apart: things that matter and things that can be ignored. We have less interest than the traditional non-geek in value attributed to non-correlated factors. The things that are important really is important. For me, prime numbers, correct use of apostrophes and statistics, the direction of the content moves when you scroll, if you ever change batteries as a complete set, not your CONNECTIONS nouns, not statements that are illogical or 't be justified (ever). I care deeply about working with intelligent people, flexibility and creativity combined with rigorous thinking and attention to detail. I don 't matter who they want to fall asleep.

And yet my little company's three-for-three on the queer-counter. A lesbian (me), a gay man and a woman asexual. It seems that gay men and women in our industry in a way that \ may be over-represented 't simply is not rejected, we' re still, actively welcomed, because the tech world is full of people who first have hand experiences of social exclusion.

Some were too wise to understand some couldn 't the social norms around entertainment, but most of us spent our childhood, well outside the group. My wife is a psychotherapist and tells me that everyone has an experience of her childhood spent outside the group, but if you re 'an eight-year-old carries a pack of cards with physical issues in the case, believe me, this is a Another type of "outside".

If you're lucky, like John, who works with me, or Bill Gates himself, were found like-minded people who wanted to tinker with electronics or dice roll. Most of us were a mixture of boredom, fear and frustration, until we made our stride hit in the university or stumbled into the tech sector, where we met other people who are even more awkward socially, and even more brilliant intellectually, were than we do. Ridicule was replaced by cooperation.

It goes further though than simple tolerance. The tech industry folk I know are vehemently against discrimination in any form. Perhaps from bitter experience, or maybe we 're still burning from the collective senseless loss of one of our most brilliant minds: Alan Turing. You can 't deny the human sadness of his story, but for those of us who are logical value' s an additional layer of tragedy to the way our country treats the father of modern computing. We are uninhabitable not only from his life - pursuit of him to be gay, pushed him to chemical castration as an alternative to accepting a prison - we played the world for 30 or 40 year performance of one of the greatest problem solving minds in history. To be gay. That 's just stupid, and I' ve never had a tech person, wasn 't against stupid things.

It 's both brilliant and irrelevant that Tim Cook has replaced Steve Jobs at Apple. His appointment will solve many vicious debate among the tech community on Twitter, but the fronts will be the usual: Apple vs. Apple Suck Rock. Tim 's gay? Whatever. If 's he would fix the scrolling screwed into Lion?