A friend of mine just pointed me to an old Slashdot article referencing a 3D Visualization of Linux Kernel Development. This definitely brings out the geeky girl in me. How cool would it be to have that linked to your actual kernal such that you could watch every action fire off a series of processes and the resultant calls that are made? OMG.
Why do i firmly believe that there’s no way that this really happened:
According to news reports, the president did not blink and warmly greeted the alum, saying: “Now you’ve come back as yourself.”
In my INBOX today, i received two fun images:
Another Friendster article… This time in the NYPost and it addresses the gaming, the economic viability and the perceived “weirdness” of it.
A friend of mine forwarded me an interesting quote from Paul Hoffman’s biography on Paul Erdos: “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth”
Like all of Erdos’s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdos accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up–and wrote the $500 off as a business expense–Erdos said, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.
For those who are not familiar with Erds, he produced a wide variety of theories on mathematics (number theory, combinatorics, etc.). Of course, he’s also a pop culture reference for those interested in social networks. Erdos numbers are effectively the degree in which one is removed from collaborating with Erdos on papers. [Think Kevin Bacon game for mathematicians.]
Thomas Friedman asks “Is Google God?”
The answer is yes, increasingly so. Google is the ultimate bridge between all people and information and its power will only intensify. Perhaps their refusal to be a verb is simply to eliminate all but the Proper references to Google. No blasphemy allowed.
Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com. This article shares a variety of people’s perspectives on online dating. One paragraph particularly caught my eye:
Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities, families and schools once played.
This confirms my hunch that one of the primary roles of urban tribes are to provide people with the connections to mate. Of course, in areas where you don’t have that type of intimate network, you need to find bridges to groups through alternate means. Digital dating does this, but it’s hard to figure out what you have in common at the more fundamental levels through this mechanism. One of the nice things about schools and shared friends is that you can validate certain similarities in interesting ways.
One of my roommates finally joined Friendster. Her immediate response was that it was a fun collection of baseball cards of your friends. Of course, she doesn’t like collecting baseball cards…
A new kind of buddy list – a descriptive article about Friendster in “The Journal News”
Living in San Francisco, i don’t meet people these days who are easily shocked. Much to my surprising enjoyment, i had a long meeting with a SF Republican (yes, they do exist). At the end of discussing business, he turned to me with a curious eye, pointed to my necklace and said “What’s the V stand for?” “Vagina.” “Oh.” (as blood rapidly rushed to his face and i remained stoic as though i said nothing surprising).
Such interactions continue to give me great joy.