Photo by willandbeyond.

Washington is wonky. We’re interested in charts and budgets and lawsuits and regulatory debates and nerd rock and transportation policy and the minutiae of local politics. But according to recent data complied by the National Science Foundation, we’re merely the seventh-most geeky place in the country.

According to Yahoo!, the NSF data classifies “geeks” as “workers with a bachelor’s level of knowledge and education in science or engineering-related fields or workers in occupations that require some degree of technical knowledge or training,” of which the Washington metropolitan area has 290,700.

That’s an impressive number of geeks, sure. But in a per capita context, it’s only 12.7% of the workforce, well short of the 18.2% of San Jose residents who probably call tell you the production code of the Simpsons episode referenced in this post’s headline.

UPDATE: DCist commenter innwdc noted that if you add the Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick, MD area (which finished 9th in the NSF’s list), the D.C. area would appear to be far geekier than advertised. However, under the NSF’s per capita ranking criteria, combining the two areas would actually reduce the percentage of the D.C. metro area classified as “geeks” to 12.5 percent of the workforce, placing us into a tie with Ithaca, NY.