Something I helped to create is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian, though not currently on display.
One year in the Mid 90s I was interviewed in Wired magazine and profiled in High TImes.
Someone’s mention of being a 2nd year German student reminded me of this, the memory of which I treasure. For 2nd year German in college our instructor was German. He was clearly very frustrated at most of what everyone did, but especially at the mangled pronunciations. One day, he was walking around the classroom as different people read sentences from a book, and he was looking unhappy. When I started to read my sentence, he stopped, looked down and listened until I finished, and paused. “Hm, that sounds like German,” he said. A tiny thing, but mine own.
The only other coolness I would lay claim to (because I am anything but cool) is that, since I have been retired, I have been doing volunteer work that physically, tangibly makes our community a better place, a tiny bit at a time. I work outdoors, and people sometimes stop and thank me for my work. (Sorry, I don’t want to say too much about it, because it would make it too easy for someone to find me IRL) This work makes me happy, I’m pretty good at it, and it’s something I can continue to do for a while yet, even as I get older.
One of my works hung in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Beat that!
(I won a contest held one summer for younger kids—a self-portrait from a reflection in a hubcap. I won a camera and free museum tickets. And the long-lasting respect of the art community, of course.)
I worked for NASA in 1963.
I understand and can speak (not particularly well, I admit) a language spoken by only 200,000 or so other people.
Dying to know what language (but understand why you’d keep that private).
I once sponsored a DopeFest in Afghanistan!
It was selectively attended, though. . . prolly 'cause there was no booze.
Tripler
We Dopers can be lushes,can’t we?
I have a second degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Not terribly unique but people seem surprised when they find out, probably because I’m a flabby 59-year-old mama. I don’t practice any more…joints, ya know… 
I worked for Wernher von Braun in 1970.
I am every day. Too far to walk to the bathroom.
I (out of a sense of desperation) predicted Reggie Miller would tie the game in Game 1 of the 1995 NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals against New York.
A few seconds later, he did. And then he won the game.
Last year my son was over, and we were talking in the living room …after decades of watching the Patriots, we had sort of lost interest, but I turned it on briefly while they were about to try a field goal. “Hang on,” I said, “I just wanna hear the clank sound when he hits the bar.”
A moment later: Clank!
And then I turned off the TV as if nothing unusual had happened. My son still brings that up from time to time.
Hmmm, mine are much less cool than anything here. I’ll think of something.
In the mean time… I’ve always thought I should make a LinkedIn profile touting all the really minor things I’ve done. Excruciatingly minor.
Oh, and in our Christmas newsletter we could brag about unimportant minutia that we and our kids did.
I solved the Hampton court maze (1976) in an unusual way.
That maze has Y shaped intersections, as opposed to + shaped intersections you see in games. When going one direction, you don’t really notice the intersections, and it funnels you straight to the center. Then going the other way, you don’t know if you came from the right or left side.
So after I got to the center and tried to find my way out, I failed. So I was wandering around and I made friends with a couple of other kids. After a bit of wandering where I was recognizing every I saw, I started seeing a bunch of new people. Aha! I thought. People are coming from tour busses, so coming in waves. These new people must be from a new bus. I started going in the direction that I saw new people coming from, and walked straight out. (With my new friends of course)
Has the actual maze: Hampton Court Maze - Wikipedia
When they first started having competitions for getting robotic mice to solve mazes, they had to outlaw “Harvey Wallbanger” mice, partly because the “Harvey Wallbanger” algorithm doesn’t involve any robotic “thought” and partly because those robotic mice kept winning. The algorithm is named after the drink, and it’s a very simple alogorithm. It’s also called the “wall following” algorithm because that’s all you do. Put your right hand against the right wall. Now just go as fast as you can while keeping your right hand against the right wall. It won’t be the most efficient way out of the maze, but it will get you out of most mazes. It works just as well if you put your left hand against the left wall, though you’ll take a different path out of the maze.
The Harvey Wallbanger approach will get you out of most mazes, but it can be easily defeated by putting “loops” in your maze. Passageways can twist all around, but they usually don’t loop. Each branch either ends in a dead end or it takes you out of the maze. If you use the Harvey Wallbanger approach on a looping maze you can end up just going around and around and around one of the loops.
Looking at the diagram, the Hampton Court Maze does have a couple of loops in it. However, the Harvey Wallbanger approach will get you out of the maze, regardless of whether you choose to use your right hand or your left hand.
I didn’t know that technique until much later. Or even about x and y mazes (that’s what Games called them)
I think my use of facial recognition and population trends based on tour busses is much more clever. 
Ask me 30 years ago. I might have been cool then.
Come to think of it, make it 45 years ago. The best I can come up with these days is that I don’t need a cane to walk.
Um yeah, I pretty much think of myself as the antithesis of cool.
The closest I can get is that last year the Cornell Lab of Ornithology put a photo I took in a calendar they published and I recently won a state award for a publication I did for a club I belong to. Pretty much any award I’ve ever gotten over my lifetime has been for some nerdy thing.
That’s very cool!