Dec 242008
 

The day I found out that the letters in SAT don’t officially stand for anything was a glorious one. It was, as one of my old high school teachers would call it, my “epiphany of the day.” The SAT used to be named the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but then renamed to the Scholastic Assessment test, but finally, in 1993, was renamed to “SAT I,” without any meaning for the letters. There are many other meaningless or ridiculous acronyms, many of them being the recursive acronyms used so often in technology. Any self-respecting Unix hacker knows that GNU stands for GNU’s not Unix. Those PNGs you work with just mean “PNG’s not GIF.” In fact there seems to be almost a [more . . .]

Nov 252008
 

When was the last time you said, “That was the coolest thing ever,” but didn’t mean it? When was the last time you said something was exciting, beautiful, inspirational, or genius, when you actually meant to convey much less than superlative? The next time you want to compliment something, think about whether or not you actually mean what you say. Save the superlative words for times that actually deserve them. 

Oct 232008
 

Punch everyone leaving a large carbon footprint. Take a bath in women instead of water. Email or call your congressperson to urge them to renew the clean energy tax incentives. With the temporarily depressed price for oil, and the dipping economy drying up the investment for new green technologies, especially in venture capital, there is a dangerous risk that alternative energy will suffer a major delay in seeing widespread use. The election is just days away, and if enough people call their congresspeople, they will have no choice but to include energy in their platforms. Go to http://www.wecansolveit.org/ for more things you can do.

Oct 182008
 

“Connecting your laptop to the local coffee shop’s Wi-Fi without a good firewall and thinking you’re secure is like using a condom with thousands of holes in it and calling it safe sex.” Make sure your Windows condom doesn’t leak.

Aug 202008
 

The Olympics are the only thing I can watch for hours on end besides Star Trek. There are 28 sports, subdivided into approximately 300 events. It’s a three-week festival of the greatest athletes on Earth engaging in (what should be) friendly competition. However, a few things have marred this Olympics for me. The NBC coverage has been abysmal. There are 28 sports. Yet it seems like all I see is swimming, gymnastics, track & field, volleyball, and the occasional diving event or basketball game. Of course, to be broadcast at all, the event must have an American with a chance of making it to the finals. Where are the world champion fencing, or field hockey, or soccer, or judo, or [more . . .]

21

Jul 162008
 

I’m finally 21! Thanks to all those friends who made the day awesome– Jessica for calling right at midnight (and sending frequent updates on the 14th about how many minutes there were left to my birthday); Natasha, Catherine, Susan for appearing at my room at 12:04 with my first legal drinks and lots of friendly peer pressure; Ari, Patrick, Brandon, Ben, and others at Palantir; my CS106 sectionees that noticed it was my birthday during IGs today at the LaIR; my parents for the amusing gifts as well as money for a new fridge; the friends who wished me a happy birthday over Facebook or over the phone; the people coming to dinner tomorrow; and of course, Wilbur summer staff [more . . .]

Jul 092008
 

Hot off the presses, and slashdotted, Mercedes to stop producing petroleum-burning vehicles by 2015. This would be quite something if they succeed, and perhaps a much-needed shock to the automotive industry as a whole if they do publicly commit more money to the effort.

Jul 032008
 

Whoever was the original brainchild behind marketing SMS as a premium “feature” is both a genius and a idiot. Genius because it is now an $80 billion plus industry. Idiot because transferring text should really not cost that much. According to a Techcrunch article, it costs $1310 per MB of text messaging. This assuming 160 byte messages and the 20 cent charge on the 3G iPhones if you don’t have a plan. According to AT&T’s own 3G specs, the network can provide up to 128kbps in a moving vehicle. So that’s 160*8=1.28kbits for 20 cents, while you can download 10 times that amount in a single second. There’s something terribly wrong. I believe it will only be time before SMS [more . . .]