Item:
There is an optimal Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) at which one gains superhuman programming skills.. This is known as as the Ballmer peak.
General Information about Item:
- Oral Folklore: joke, superstition
- English
- USA
Informant Data:
Ahsan Azim is a Dartmouth computer science major in the class of 2018, from Lahore, Pakistan. He has three years of experience in computer science and is strongly interested in web development.
Contextual Data:
This joke/ritual was said to have originated at Microsoft in the 80s when Steve Ballmer was CEO. Steve Ballmer is a highly accomplished technology executive who is best known for his tenure as CEO of Microsoft. Although Ballmer is generally not considered to be the creator of this joke, Ballmer was a very humorous and fun-loving guy who was a big fan of beer and other alcoholic beverages. He was known for outlandish behavior and high-enery outbursts in public, as if he was intoxicated. This may have been the reason why the Ballmer Peak was named after him.
The Ballmer Peak is considered to be a parody of the Balmer Peak, which are peaks in the emission spectrum of hydrogen. While completely unrelated to Ballmer, coding and alcohol, the similarity between the names may have been another reason behind how the Ballmer Peak got its moniker.
Later studies did seem to suggest that consumption of alcohol up to a point did increase creative problem solving speed and ability. Some researchers found that a BAC of 0.075 did have effect on programming ability. Psychologists view the Ballmer peak as a parody of the Yerkes-Dodson law in learning psychology which states that optimal learning occurs at a certain level of stimulation.
See the famous xkcd comic on the Ballmer Peak here: xkcd Ballmer Peak
Transcript of Associated File:
Informant’s Comments:
It [the Ballmer peak] has remained popular until today because many programmers are big fans of beer and/or other drinks such as vodka. At many hackathons [coding competitions] and computer programming events there is often free-flowing beer and wine. Programmers in general tend to be very fun-loving people as well.
Collector’s Comments:
This could be classified as either a joke (as a comic parody that is initially hard to believe) or a ritual (a process that programmers go through before they start programming). It is often thrown around by programmers who try to find the location of the Ballmer peak with their other programmer friends when they are bored of working on something. In a way, finding the Ballmer peak is like finding one of the Holy Grails of computer science.
Collector’s Name: Weiliang (Michael) Li
Tags/Keywords:
- ballmer, peak, alcohol, programming, microsoft, joke, ritual