As soon as I saw this word, I guessed that El Reg was the source.

I was surprised to see it - I thought "boffin" was good-natured but highly irreverent, like "nerd". But I can't imagine any publication writing the headline, "Computer nerd claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute."

Completely unrelated but I'm always sad that Umbra, Penumbra and Equinox aren't used very often in day-to-day speech, very cool sounding words.