Entries with tag "nerds"

There's a big debate about Windows vs. Linux, but I think most people versed in the issue acknowledge that Linux has obvious advantages over Windows — most notably security and stability (My Linux server at home had been up for about 180 days until the UPS failed during a power outage last week. We've got Linux machines at work with uptimes of 885 days). I don't think that most people who choose Windows do so because they actually believe Windows is superior to Linux in aspects like those — it's just that Linux's downsides (difficult to configure, more geeky knowledge needed, incompatibility with a lot of hardware due to no manufacturer support, etc.) are enough to outweigh its benefits.

[Entry Continues...]

I realized recently that I understand the bitterness that gay people feel about how it's "cute" to be lesbian these days. I see the same thing occurring with nerds. Everyone loves to say how much they love nerds these days, or how they're a big nerd, but I suspect very few of them would really enjoy sitting in on a Linux install or helping to calculate 100 digits of π with pencil and paper for the fun of it. I think this recent infatuation with nerds is similar to the same way that I like cows or Japanese like Americans: They like the concept, but the actuality is less glamorous and a lot more Cheez-Doodle-encrusted.

For years, whenever conversations turned to the subject of my dorkiness, I could defend myself by saying, "Yeah, I'm a nerd, but at least I'm not the lame kind. I mean, I don't watch Star Trek or anything."

[Entry Continues...]

I was going through all my old camcorder tapes today, trying to locate the video of my brother and I almost getting hit by a plane at St. Barths. I didn't find it, but I did encounter a bunch of fun videos I had forgotten. In lieu of the propeller death video, I figured I'd put these up instead. Odds are they won't be amusing to people who weren't actually there at the time, but I figure that's probably most of you anyway.

My Xvid encoder was being obstinate, and would sometimes refuse to encode a video with anything other than the absolute lowest audio quality setting. Ah well, they're not too bad, and it's only one or two of them.

[Entry Continues...]

According to the the generally accepted scientific understanding of the 18th century, all combustion was attributable to phlogiston, a colorless, odorless, tasteless, massless substance. At the time, the scientific community believed that all flammable materials contained a certain amount of phlogiston. The act of burning the materials was in fact merely releasing the phlogiston into the air. Once burned, the materials were held to be in their "true" form, the 'calx'. Thus the act of burning was known as 'dephlogisticating' a substance.

[Entry Continues...]

OK, my standards seem to be getting pretty low as far as what I'm willing to post here. Soon you'll start seeing surveys about the number of people I've kissed and "What type of pasta are you?" quizzes. But these make me laugh and, ultimately, that's one of the few goals I strive towards here.

Q. What do you get if you cross a pig and a sheep?

A. A vector with magnitude (length of pig * length of sheep * sin θ) in the direction mutually perpendicular to the pig and the sheep determined by the right hand rule.

Q. What do you get if you cross a mosquito and a mountain climber?

A. You can't; a mountain climber is a scalar!

A policeman pulls a guy over. "Do you know that you just ran through a red light?" he says.
"I didn't run a red light," the guy says. "I saw the light, and it was green."
The policeman says, "Well, then I'll have to write you a speeding ticket!"

Q. What is the physicist's definition of a vector space?

A. A set V satisfying the axiom that for any x in V, x has a little arrow drawn over it.

Have you ever debated whether or not you should date me? Come on, you know you have. To help you make your decision, a kind soul on CraigsList has done a good job of enumerating the reasons geeks and nerds are worth it. The ball's in your court...

I remember reading about the creations of Theo Jansen years ago, but Jason Kottke's recent post about Jansen reminded me just how cool the guy is. He's a Dutch artist who has been building 'beach animals' for about 14 years now. He makes huge walking skeletons out of plastic yellow tubes, with big sail-like spines to catch the wind, which they use as a source of power. They have valves and pneumatic "muscles" that they use to move their 11-segment limbs. As this Wired article says, "Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm."

[Entry Continues...]

Some kids at MIT are having a Time Traveller Convention this evening. Their intention was for it to become so widely publicized that it would be remembered far into the future, so that if time travel is ever invented, people can travel back in time and attend.

They've specified exact coordinates for the event in latitude, longitude, and time. However, a few things worry me. First of all, they don't specify altitude (i.e. distance from the center of the Earth). Warping in just 50 feet off in either direction could be unpleasant. Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the Earth is travelling at 30 km/sec around the Sun. Being just a few seconds off in your calculations would place you in the bitter cold of space. Even if you do match the speed of the Earth, you need to consider its rotation, and warp in with the right amount of lateral velocity. At the equator, the surface of the Earth revolves at 1670 km/hr. Warping in without matching that speed would send you flying into a wall at around Mach 1.4.

One last concern, as pointed out by a Slashdotter:

Seeing the location depicted so accurately, I have only one fear...

Telefrags.

The things one finds while browsing WikiPedia at random. I came across the programming language called COW (WikiPedia entry), which is written in a language that cows can understand. Since the only word that cows know is 'moo', all commands in COW are variants of the word 'moo', with differing capitalization.

[Entry Continues...]

Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

[Entry Continues...]

I've been trying to think of some cool project I can build with my Lego Mindstorms set. JP Brown's site details some cool Mindstorms robots he's made, such as CubeSolver, which solves Rubik's Cubes, Aegis, an auto-tracking squirrel-hunting cannon, and K9, a camera-enabled robotic dog that plays fetch.

[Entry Continues...]

Well, that was a waste of an hour and a half. My plan was to go to the sci-fi convention today, camera firmly in hand, and take pictures of all the costumed nerds (OK, and probably enjoy myself a whole lot). I called the place it was at, Tropimar, to ask when it ended, and they said 8pm. Splendid. So around 4pm I headed off, but got stuck in traffic, which I keep forgetting to factor into my plans.

I finally got there around 5, but figured I still had three hours, which would likely be more than enough nerdage to satisfy me. However, as I pulled into the parking lot, the guy in line ahead of me was backing out, and the parking attendant told me that they had just closed. I asked if there was any other place to park and he said nope, not in the area. Excellent. So essentially I had to turn around and go home (and fight my way through the traffic again), having seen nothing but one slightly costumed nerd in a purple wig standing out by the curb. I didn't even get to hear the guy who played Chewbacca make that great "Awwwaararagggh" sound, as I'm sure someone would have asked him to do.

Haha, there's a sci-fi convention here on Sunday, and Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in the first three episodes of Star Wars (and is reprising the role in the upcoming Episode III) will be speaking. I'm tempted to go just for the hell of it :) I wonder if they will stage a reenactment. I sure hope they pick me. (mp3)

Another cool example of the sheer genius concentrated at Google. Google Sets accepts a list of terms, and attempts to predict other items that fit in the same "category". It's eerily clever. Some examples I tried: supra/camry, images and words/awake. Did you forget the noble gases? Enter helium/argon/neon and you get the rest of the list (with some other non-noble elements at the end, though). What movies has Angelina Jolie been in? I know she was in Hackers and Tomb Raider... Awesome.

Illustrated Notes from Computer Science: Tom Murphy VII makes wonderful things when bored in class.

I think I need this, although it sort of scares me. The guys at MIT came up with Clocky, which is a little clock for people who have trouble waking up. When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, clocky will roll off the bedside table, run away, and hide. Minutes later when the alarm goes off again, the sleeper must get up and look for Clocky. Clocky is kind of like a troublesome pet that you love anyway. Everyday he finds a new hiding spot.

Yes, ingenious, but I don't think I could sleep comfortably with that creepy, furry creature lying in wait next to me, ready to scurry off into a dark corner. It would certainly help to break up the morning routine though.

I learned today that well-known linguist, human rights speaker, and every political band's favorite source of samples, Noam Chomsky, an Institute Professor of linguistics at MIT. Just one more reason I'd love to have spent time there.

As for Google, my score on the SAT, the only saving grace of my academic career, would be irrelevant to them. What they're interested in is an employment candidate's performance on the GLAT — the Google Labs Aptitude Test. In case their URLs change, I've got the four pages here:

• Page 1
• Page 2
• Page 3
• Page 4

I love working at Xapiens, but I can't help but swoon at a company that clearly has so much nerdy fun in what they do, and look for the same in their prospective employees. Though I feel terribly inadequate, perhaps someday I'll work up the nerve to send them my resume or something. In the meantime, I'll continue to gaze on them from afar with heart-shaped eyes.

Warning: We Brake For Number Theory

I think I can safely say that Google is the company I'd most like to work for. But I'm scared to imagine the heights to which my nerdiness would soar in that kind of environment.

[Entry Continues...]