Miscellany

Things my RSS feed wants me to do this week: Stay productive after work on my side projects because if work and your homelife are all you’re doing, you’re a bum. Go to NYC for Manhattanhenge or make plans to go back for it in July. Buy Travel Blog the Board Game – even though from the description it is unclear where the “Blog” part of the game comes in. Consider if I am suprised that those over 55 pick more secure passwords than those under 25.

Things my RSS feed wants me to do this week: Buy a set of ninja throwing knives. Rate American English accents – helping researchers is good! You should do this too! Turn my sensitive documents into a fireplace log. Contribute to a project to produce a new letterpress-printed edition of Pride and Prejudice. Get excited about the start of commercial space transportation!

A couple of thoughts on motivation and procrastination for your Monday… Working hurts less that procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting “Thanks to hyperbolic discounting (i.e., weighting values in inverse proportion to their temporal distance) the instant pain of disengaging from an Internet article and paying a prefrontal override cost, can outweigh the slightly more distant (minutes in the future, rather than seconds) pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually more painful than being in the middle of doing the work.” where’s my motivation from pictures for sad children

Words is an absolutely beautiful little play on language and meaning; it’s only three minutes so I highly recommend you check it out. Found at this list of the ten most wonderful internet films of 2010, all of which are worth a look, actually.

“When I talk to young designers, and I talk to people who want to be designers, I tell them, “Here is the truth: The truth is, you are never going to make your dream game, so get over it. Okay? You are going to work really, really hard, you are going to go to school, you are going to spend time learning, you are going to write papers, you are going to intern someplace where you work very hard, and when you finally get your first job, it’s going to be designing levels for Hello Kitty.” And what I look … Continue reading Start of the Semester Inspiration

It is nice when a little thing that has been done wrong for so long will start being done right. Case in point, I was actually mildly excited to read that after doing it wrong for years, Subway will start tessellating their cheese triangles worldwide starting July 1, which is silly because I maybe get a sub there once or twice a year max. But now I won’t have to live with the knowledge that every time I drive past a Subway there are people in there making subs with asymmetric cheese distribution.

As pointed out at Slashdot a couple of days ago, there is a pretty interesting converstation going on over at Wikipedia about whether it is ethical for them to include images of Rorschach inkblots. The inkblots are now in the public domain, so the issue is not ownership. The issue is that the Rorschach inkblot test requires that the images be novel to the subject, so would Wikipedia be doing harm by potentially depriving those in need of psychological help a potential treatment tool. The conversation on the talk page has gotten quite long so I’ve only skimmed most of … Continue reading Looks like a butterfly

I think everybody knows about Bacon numbers (distance between people in the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game) and if you hang in math circles you know about Erdos numbers (publication distance from the prolific Paul Erdos) but I just found out that people have started computing Erdős–Bacon numbers (via ALOTT5MA). Traditionally one only counts credited movie appearances towards one’s Bacon number, but for this, a relaxed set of rules is adopted which gives me a Bacon-Erdos number! I get an Erdos number of 4 through a paper with my PhD advisor and I get a Bacon number of 4 … Continue reading I am equally mathematically and pop-culturally prominent!

Sitting at this stoplight, I found myself wondering, how do you even figure out how many hit points a van has left?