There's a lobster on my head

(via A.S.B.)

Lockhart's Lament

I've probably already showed this link to a lot of people I know, but if not, you ought to read this. It's an essay entitled "A Mathematician's Lament", written by Paul Lockhart, a teacher of mathematics. It's more commonly referred to as just "Lockhart's Lament". It's a really fantastic read, especially if you've never pursued math beyond high school or early college - you have no idea what you missed. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should be a math major, but I'm saying that the tedious drills that schoolchildren do are about as far away from real math as they could possibly be. You can read the whole thing here (it's a pdf), but keep reading for some of my favorite quotes.

Every Base is Base 10

All Along The Watchtower

Just when I thought I wasn't going to have anything to write about today, I came across this absolutely fantastic cover of All Along The Watchtower. This version was composed by Bear McCreary for Battlestar Galactica - check it out!

Precious and libraries

Today's blog post has two parts. First off, I went and saw Precious tonight, and I highly recommend it. It's really intense and depressing at times, but in the end it turns out positively, maybe even a bit inspiring. It's one of those movies that you walk out of kind of stunned, but later glad that you went.

Second, a very interesting post I found today in an online discussion. For context, the discussion was over whether paper books will eventually die off in favor of e-books. Someone asked what everyone thinks about libraries, and someone else replied:

Waiter Rant

One of my absolute favorite blogs to read is Waiter Rant. It started out as what you might expect, given the name: the rants and ravings of an anonymous waiter working at a high class restaurant in New York City. However, the author is so much more than just a waiter. He also used to work at a mental hospital, and has since quit his job as a waiter and now writes about random parts of his life. On top of all that, he's a fantastic writer. It's hard to do justice to his writing, so I'll give you some examples:

Post?

So I've been trying to keep up with this whole posting something every day thing, but this weekend at Crown threw me off that schedule. I didn't really do anything interesting or blog-worthy today, so instead I'll share with you some of the things I've recently favorited on YouTube - guaranteed to be a good source of entertainment.

12 hours on the train today, oy. Thank god for my computer and amtrak's power outlets

TED

Where to begin? TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a yearly conference designed, in the words of their mission statement, to "offer free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers". They do this by first inviting a great number of great minds and giving each of them 18 minutes max (no matter how famous they are) to tell the audience about "ideas worth spreading". Then, they put each one of those talks online, absolutely free and open. The talks are all fascinating, and they cover a huge amount of subject matter. You can check out the list of all talks, but here's a list of some of my favorites.

Bruce Schneier on the value of privacy

Bruce Schneier is one of my favorite people to read on the topic of security. I found out about him from this excellent article on airport security, and why it's a sham, or to use his best-known phrase, "security theater". However, today I came across a post on his blog about the argument that any government surveillance is okay because "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care if they're looking?" Enjoy it, and look around and read more of his stuff.

EDIT: just finished another long but excellent article about him (circa 2002) explaining what's wrong with the security measures being taken in response to 9/11. His basic thesis is that our security systems are "brittle"; that is, when one component of the system fails, the whole thing fails, and fails hard. Systems should instead be designed to "fail well" when someone goes wrong, because it inevitably will. Read it here.

Picture messaging!

This is a picture of a bench outside Ewell Hall, showing the accumulation we got (not much compared to Nova!).

EDIT: Apparently to get MMS pictures to show up, I can't use the same number I use for SMS, instead I have to use the email address I use for email posting. Plus this horrible ad shows up beneath every post, I guess I'll just have to get used to that over the summer.

LoL oMg LiK Hi Evry1! kidding aside, here's a post by text. awesome! wonder what becomes the title though?

EDIT: looks like there is none, oddly enough. I can live with that though.

Testing?

So for today, I'm testing out two cool features that'll let me update
my blog quite easily over the summer without a computer. First up is
posting by email -this is being written on my iTouch! Next up will be
posting via SMS.

Google Buzz!

Just a few hours ago, Google announced their latest service: Buzz. It seems like it's basically Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader, etc all rolled into one service available straight through Gmail (Buzz is going to go right between Inbox and Starred). I'm really interested to see if it takes off. I'm very plugged into Google when it comes to socializing (mail and reader), as are a lot of my friends, so I could certainly see us using this. It seems like it'll basically be like Google Reader, except you contribute your own content rather than sharing someone else's (the two services are begging to be integrated!). Hopefully this'll do better than Wave, which seems like it's kind of stalling so far.

Pictures!

I've decided that today will be picture day for this blog. Some of these pictures are just random, but a lot of them come from a fantastic photojournalism blog called The Big Picture, run by the Boston Globe. It's a perfect example of how to take advantage of the unique opportunities for news offered by the internet, i.e. incredibly detailed, high-resolution photos on an extremely simple website. No obtrusive ads, no complicated interface to navigate, just a page with pictures. Now, with that said, have some pictures!

Space Shuttle

So I realize this might be a day too late to be relevant, but a fairly historic event took place at 4:14 AM this morning - the last nighttime space shuttle launch by NASA. For those of you that don't know (and I didn't until quite recently), NASA is in the process of phasing out their aging fleet of space shuttles. Will there be a next generation of some kind? Probably, but no one really knows what's going to happen. Other nations still have space programs that can fly, so they'll be taking care of the International Space Station and that sort of thing. I think there's something like 5 shuttles launches left, but regardless, this one was the last one at night, and thus probably the last one I'd ever be able to see from where I live.

So, I mustered my insanity and geekdom and got up at 3:30 AM to go see it. I was barely able to get myself to get out of bed. I pitched the idea to my roommate, but he was not really interested in freezing himself when he should be sleeping in order to see a speck in the sky; I can't say I blame him. Anyway, I did manage to force myself out of the bed, out of the dorm (COLD COLD COLD), and walk about 10 minutes to a pretty open area devoid of streetlights. And right on schedule at 4:20, I saw it. A small but distinct dot, about as bright as the brightest stars out that night, was cruising across the sky a little bit above the horizon. Fortunately, it was high enough that the trees and buildings didn't block it, so I was able to watch it for the whole way.

On the one hand, it really was just a little speck, and arguably might not have been worth it for how tired I felt for the rest of today. But on the other hand, I just took advantage of one of the last chances I'll have for a while where I live to see people going into space. People. In space. How crazy is that? That little dot wasn't some mysterious fusion reactor billions of miles away that we call a "star", it was a human-engineered and human-launched chunk of metal, with actual people in it, leaving the confines of our planet behind. It's really mindblowing, and I wish I'd been alive for the first moon landing, because I feel like people who grew up with that as a given might find it easy to not be all that impressed by space shuttles. It's just something that's there. We sent people into space, yup. Whoop-dee-do. I'm glad I had this opportunity to sort of think about it freshly.

It was also interesting to see how artificial our concepts of "time", "night and day", and so on are. NASA launched people into space at 4:14 AM, a time when most of humanity is rightfully asleep. And what's more, they had a news conference about the launch at 5:30. Five! Who else but NASA has the guts to hold news conferences at five in the morning?

Mashups

Mashups are a funny kind of music. A mashup basically consists of bits and pieces of existing songs spliced together, i.e. mashed up together. There are quite a few different varieties of mashups - the simplest is to just take the vocals from one song and add them to the music of another. Others take that concept to its extreme, adding tiny pieces of different songs together to make an incredibly complex new work, often changing what songs are used quite rapidly. I'll give some great examples after the break

Not Always Right

Here's a funny website for today: Not Always Right. It's site that features user-submitted customer service horror stories, except it's not the service that's bad, it's the customer! The name comes from "The customer is Not Always Right". It updates about 4-5 times a day, but it has an RSS feed so you can keep tabs on it. See some sample stories after the jump

Solitaire Meets Number Theory

First off, when I say solitaire, I don't mean the game that everyone calls "Solitaire". That's Klondike. Solitaire refers to any card game that can be played by just one person. The solitaire game I'll be talking about here is called Pyramid. The rules are pretty simple: first, you lay out cards in a pyramid of 7 rows (first 1 card, then 2, then 3, etc). The goal is to remove all the cards from the pyramid, and you can only remove cards in pairs that add up to 13 (where A = 1, J = 11, Q = 12, and K = 13). So, for example, you can remove an A and a Q, 6 and 7, 5 and 8, or a K by itself. You can also only remove cards that aren't covered by other cards. You can see in the image how each card is covered directly by two others, plus a bunch more farther below

If you get stuck, you can draw cards one at a time from the rest of the deck, called the Stack. So, that's all well and good, but what on earth does math have to do with this? Read on, dear reader.

A February 4th resolution?

So, as you can see, I've discovered that it's hard to have enough substantive, interesting content to fill a blog with regularly. I think that's partly because I have a tendency to not want to write anything here unless I have something that I think is really super awesome. So, I'm going to go to the other end of the spectrum. I certainly use the internet at least once a day, and I definitely think or say or see or experience something interesting or noteworthy every day, so why not combine the two and update this blog every day? That's what I'm going to try and do.

So, for today (it's past midnight, but it counts as today), I'm going to share a picture. I'm in a class called Worlds of Music, which is basically about learning to see and listen to music in a broader context than just the usual "classical" music. It's a really cool class so far, and our first quiz is tomorrow, so I made a playlist in iTunes of the musical samples we've listened to so far to study. It's a pretty varied list, to say the least. You have to click on the picture to see it full-size.