I wrote this as an Op-Ed for the last progression of University Writing. Posted here to share. A recent study found that 87% of US undergraduates are on Facebook for an average of 93 minutes daily. At 11 hours a week that’s nearly as long as many of us spend in class. If 12 hours [...]
Apparently Siri is good friends with Eliza. Er, except Eliza is retired these days… Well, I’m glad she has a friend at least.
Last Thursday Night/Friday morning I participated in an all night NYC bike ride for one of my classes. For more official background, the WSJ wrote it up. It was an optional activity as part of the History of the City of New York class I’m taking with Kenneth Jackson at Columbia University. He, the class, and [...]
Playing around today, I came upon an obvious/clever idea. A bit of hacking in Inkscape led to this. Note the crown, font and colors (don’t sue me, Trustees!)… For those interested I’ve uploaded PDF (if you want to print or have a larger copy or something) and SVG (if you want to modify) files. It’s [...]
Inspired by an Ars thread that was inspired by a 4chan thread found on reddit, it’s an interesting sort idea for integers. Basically, sort a list of integers by spawning a new thread or process for each element then sleep for the value of that element then print out that element. Here’s the original bash [...]
So Stracraft II is a fantastic game, and includes achievements. I’ve turned into a bit of a SC2 achievement whore (Currently: 3350). I long ago completed every achievement in the single player campaign except 4: The Lost Viking. It’s a stupid arcade game within the game! It doesn’t matter at all! Yet I was tantalizingly close to [...]
On Thursday I went to a neat event called “The Art & Science of Beer” hosted by Google’s DC office. They had Greg Engert, the beer impressario from Churchkey, gave a ~90 minute talk with samples of 7 beers. Most of the talk was on the mechanics of beer making throughout history, and how what [...]
I suffer, as I’m sure many internet overusers do, with a bit of ADD. When browsing the internet I’ll often stumble across articles in the 2000-10,000 word range. They’re interesting, but they’re not what I need now. In the past I’d tend to leave them open in a tab for a few days or weeks, maybe [...]
Someone on twitter shared this article about the size of the big 4 ad agencies. Unfortunately it’s horribly, horribly flawed. First, the numbers they’re presenting are wrong. I copied the headline numbers that they linked to into Excel (that file, with my graphs, is: here). Their top 4 category is right. The four largest do [...]
Apparently today is a good day to do historic stuff. The first piece of usenet/email spam was posted; the first space shuttle, Columbia, was first launched; Yuri Gagarin was the first person in space; FDR died; and the Civil War began with the battle of Fort Sumter. (and my cousin (once removed) was baptized!) Through the [...]