Tim Saylor

I’ve officially graduated from IIT. I don’t think it’s a big deal at all. I’m relieved to never have to deal with class again, but since I already have a job, and I’ve either had a job or acted like it for the past year, there’s not much of a change (aside from having to get up earlier).

However, I am looking forward to “Woe in the Snow 2005″. I leave on tuesday to go to Dan’s house, then off to Boyers’ in Ohio, a brief tour of Flint, MI (home of :rolleyes: Michael Moore), then Chris and Karina in MI, then off to the great white north (Toronto, ON, CA) . It’s sure to be a fun trip!

I went to a hookah bar last night with Paul, Dan, and Jose. It was surprisingly cool. When I tried hookah before it seemed like a waste of time, but this time I got a little bit buzzed. Not anything like drinking, but it wasn’t bad. The place was much more middle-eastern than the other place I went to before, which was basically a regular store with some kind of ethnic furniture. The place last night had pillows for seating, curtains for walls, arab looking decor, the whole works. It was pretty cool.

I first heard about Brandon Bird when his coloring book appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I bought the coloring book and it was a good laugh. Then I checked out more of his art on his website and it was really cool stuff. He seems to do a lot of wierd paintings featuring recognizable people, and they’re funny and cool looking. I really like “King of the Cage” and am thinking of buying it. You can check him out here.

I don’t know whether it would be funny or pathetic if I had posted this.

(Cross posted from Slashdot)

Some folks at MIT are holding a time-travelers’ convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers. For those interested in attending, it’s on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees).

Some researchers at Purdue University have demonstrated that while pi does not contain a pattern, other sources of randomness are better. The article shows their experimental process, which sounds kind of like the opposite of clustering. It’s pretty interesting, check it out here.