I’m restarting this blog with a new focus. Before I would post amusing happenings and general bloggy type things, but now I’ve moved that to my livejournal (a much better place for that type of blog) and this will be exclusively for talking about ideas and technologies about anything, from software to ancient Greek siege weapons. I’m mostly writing these things down for my benefit, but maybe the information will be useful to someone else too.
The organisers of the march, the Democratic Co-ordination of Niger Civil Society (CDSN), accuse the government of not doing enough to prepare for the “hungry season” which was bound to follow a poor rainy season last year. The rainy season finished last October and it was obvious that supplies would not last through until the next harvest, they say.
I accuse the Nigerians of not doing enough to prepare their own families for the “hungry season” that was “obviously” coming.
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.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but here are some good reasons that you ladies should date geeks and nerds (that means me 
).
This is one of the coolest vocal performances I’ve seen.