Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you eve…
Not everyone works in a San Francisco-based start up that employees 90% technical folks. Perhaps people are just interested in a low-effort conversation item so they can interact with co-workers, neighbors, and a different social circle? Some engineers like the fact that they can enjoy fantasy sports for the nerdy, statistics aspect and still be involved with something enjoyed by "normal" people. Not everything in li…
* Fluorescence. (At a cocktail bar full of blacklights. Any cocktail containing tonic glowed due to the quinine.)
* Comparing the stories of Alistair Reynolds and Lawrence Watt-Evans. Their fans seem to overlap quite a bit, even though their genres are different.
* Beard growth. Why most militaries don't let soldiers grow beards. (Beards prevent gas masks from sealing well.) How fast beards grow. (About 5 nanometers per second, hence the beard-second as a unit of measure[1].)
* Noticing that dentists can replace teeth, but doctors can do little for chronic back pain.
* Laser interferometer microphones.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measu...