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Maybe now that football’s over, the internet’s jock/nerd balance has swung the unsportsy way. For whatever reason, this week’s 3BT is by far the nerdiest yet. If I knew any Star Trek quotes, I’d drop one here; you couldn’t even stop me.

Your socially awkward links:

• How nerdy was the fifth week of the ’10s? Barbie’s a computer engineer now. Guess math’s just not as hard as it used to be! Either way, this dad approves. Smart Barbie has the green light to hang out with my daughter. (Barbie: biggest dark horse nerd since Vin Diesel? [X-Files quote].)
• Splitting up the U.S. into seven cliquey regions, based on data pulled from Facebook. Here’s the data source thing you can use to see which Facebook fan pages are most popular in your city and which other cities your neighbors are most connected to. Also, you’ll learn that Taraji P. Henson is apparently one of the most popular people in the world. Had no idea! [Lord of the Rings quote], know what I mean? Ha ha!
• A cool thing, I swear: interactive Scale of the Universe thing, spanning everything from stuff so small that it probably doesn’t, like, exist to the whole-entire universe itself. CLICK IT and PUSH PLAY and FIDDLE WITH THE BLUE THING — come on. It’s SUCH COOL STUFF, guys.

Also, marvel at Reddit’s ridiculous list of the most useful websites. [Lost quote]. No, I promise you’ll be amazed.

Nerd Creates Herd of Himself

This nerd conducting a live screencast clicks to watch himself conducting his live screencast, and hell follows after. At the :31-second mark, the Nerd Hall of Mirrors soars into the Nerd Hall of Fame, [Monty Python quote].

• Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHERE IN SPORTS: Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
• Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
• OK OK, time for a Happy News Contest… I’ll trot out this one: apologetic Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates via Facebook. How are you gonna top that?
• One more… What movies like Die Hard express about the ways people interact with architecture.

Two Rich Guys Arguing

Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.

“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”

The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:

• I’m sure many people caught the dichotomy between the New York Times’ puff piece on scammy Facebook gaming company Zynga (aka the people behind FarmParty or whatever) and TechCrunch’s super truth-diggy journalism on the same subject. Fake Steve collated the whole story well, so we’ll roll with his perspective.
• You know when you hear those stupid woe-is-us “91% of American high school seniors have never heard of Thomas Jefferson, Barack Obama, or God, but they know all the words to every rock ‘n’ roll song by Lil Diddy” things? You know how common sense always tells you that can’t possibly be true? Somebody finally put it to the test: Yes, the kids are allright. Of course they are. I mean, they have freaking Wikipedia to fall back on.
• The Yankees’ payroll is larger than the payrolls of several other teams combined. This may be possible to repeat often enough, but Joe Posnanski isn’t taking any chances; in fact, he’s written the perfect antidote to watching the Yankees try and squeeze into Everybody Doubted Us hats and We’re Just Having Fun Out There shirts.

• When tempers flare, it’s important to take a break and count to ten. Here’s a pretty soothing ten: Top Ten Things You Think You Know about Iran that are not True.
• Diddy Puff Daddy signed to Interscope Records this week, essentially spelling the end of Bad Boy Entertainment, the record label that ran the mid-to-late 1990s. A retrospective from an insider: Bad Boy Is Dead, Long Live Bad Boy.
• True, we offer social media consulting. We prefer to incorporate this service as a small piece of a larger project, and we believe in results, not fads. But, of course, there’s no shortage of Web 4.0 Social Twitcyclopedia-Blogitannica Hucksters out there who don’t give a crap about developing good reputations with their clients. The following is all-too familiar for anyone who runs a web business (yes, we get this kind of spam in our inboxes just like you do) … also, Not Safe For Work due to its many cusses: