Who is the nerdiest one of all? Two week ago, the Adventures in Ethics and Science blog challenged its readers to nominate the most nerdly people they knew for recognition as the top nerd (The Chronicle, September 7).

And now the results are in: The nerd king is Mark C. Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist and researcher at an unnamed corporate laboratory. Mr. Chu-Carroll, in a somewhat un-nerdly gesture, nominated himself. But his c.v. certainly represents a pinnacle of nerdliness. He claims to know over 150 programming languages, to have read The Lord of the Rings 30 times, to be a Doctor Who fan, to own and play 30 tinwhistles, and to read programming-language specifications for fun. Hmm. Pretty good stuff.

But as he himself seems to observe in his nominating c.v., which proclaims his geekiness, all of those qualities really suit him for recognition as a world-class geek, not a top nerd. To true nerds, there is a difference, and one wonders why the blogger who conceived the contest— Janet D. Stemwedel, an assistant professor of philosophy at San Jose State University—did not disqualify Mr. Chu-Carroll on those grounds. Start a Great Geek challenge if you wish, Ms. Stemwedel, but don’t call it a Nerd-Off.

For her part, Ms. Stemwedel declines to disclose how she picked the winner. “I’d share the algorithm,” she writes, “but it’s proprietary.”

For academic nerds, however, the greatest disappointment lies in the fact that the winner hailed from the corporate world, not the academy. Is this further evidence of the decline of academic scholarship? What is to be done?