Geek/Dork/Nerd: what's-cookin' edition

Just this morning I was contemplating how Alton Brown is the quintessential cooking geek. He uses welding gloves instead of over mitts, hot-rodded his Weber grill, and devised a new ontology of baking methods to better explicate the baking process. If you are at all inclined to cook, I can't recommend his books enough.

What list of cooking geeks would be complete without the kitchen chemist Heston Blumenthal? Pioneer of molecular gastronomy, his work can be found for ridiculous prices at http://www.fatduck.co.uk/

Alton Brown is the best geek ever! I love that he doesn't just say, "You must combine use butter in making pie crust," but explains why cool butter works best and what it does to the dough to make it flaky (punch!) and tender (sock!) at the same time. The sound effects are from his pie crust episodes, in which he's whacked upside the head by Punch puppets who represent flaky and tender, and who else but an Xer geek would explain pie crust using science AND puppets?!