In-Sight has published part one of a massive four-part interview with Rick Rosner, my high school friend who went to high school for a decade, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was the subject of an Errol Morris documentary, and became a writer for Jimmy Kimmel.
In the 1970s, there was no such thing as nerd chic. If you were nerdy, you were probably lonely. But, like many misguided nerds, I thought my intelligence and niceness would inspire a girl to look past my nerdiness. I spent the second semester of ninth grade building a Three-Dimensional Gaussian Distribution Generator to demonstrate to my honors math class. The machine dropped a thousand BBs through a pyramidal tower of overlapping half-inch grids into a 24-by-12 array of columns. It was a supercharged Plinko machine with an added spatial dimension, forming a half-bell of BBs, thanks to the laws of probability. During its construction, I thought, "A girl will see this elegant experimental apparatus, think I'm brilliant, and become my girlfriend." I completed the BB Machine in time to demonstrate it to the class on the last day of school. No one cared. Of course they didn't – it was the last day of junior high, and a dweeb was pouring BBs into a plastic pyramid.
See also:
My genius friend Rick Rosner went to high school for 10 years
I went to high school with the smartest (or 2nd smartest) man on earth
