This past weekend, Scott, Ronnie, Nick, Jerry, and I hung out. During part of the evening, the conversation turned to brazil nuts (don't ask me how that happened; I have no clue). ( A discussion of brazil nuts and a search for the only brazil nut plantation in the world )

Hells yeah! The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group in charge of domain registrars (who are in charge of keeping track of who owns what domain names) ( changed some boring policies. )

Randall Munroe, creator of the hilarious webcomic XKCD, gave a talk at work last week, and it was pretty interesting. I bring this up because he discussed the current comic in his talk. When the Google Labs Aptitude Test came out, Randall decided he was going to apply, but he didn't want to turn it in until he had gotten all of the questions. He ( Read more... )

Back in November, I watched a bunch of videos from TED, and I've been raving to my friends about the first one ever since. It's by Hans Rosling, who displayed a really neat way to represent statistics and other large sets of data in a simple, intuitive, and basically useful way. Well, it turns out I wasn't the only one who was impressed: his ( Read more... )

I just flew in from Reno, and boy are my arms tired. The ironic thing is that it's totally true. Here's what's happened in the past 48 hours:

( The first party )

So... in the past 2 weeks, I've founded another bridge club. Today was the first meeting of the Google Santa Monica bridge club, and we actually had 2 tables! The biggest the Harvey Mudd club ever got was 2 tables (not counting the times when we hosted the ACBL Unit 551 games, which really only had 1 table of Mudders on any given day). and it ( Read more... )

I realize it's old news at this point, but President Bush is still out of touch with the world ( Read more... )

Today the Senate voted down a gay marriage amendment, 49-48 (it needed 60 votes) (thanks to mikasaur2000 for the link to the article, which is a rather good one). I watched the Daily Show yesterday, in which John Stewart debated the topic with Bill Bennett and made some excellent points. For instance, Mr. Bennett claimed that marriage was threatened by this, ( Read more... )

I suspect this case will grow to be as big a Right To Die issue as the Schiavo case was. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Time will tell what happens...

In other news, Google has refused to comply with a federal subpoena asking to see search requests it handles, presumably to learn more about who is looking at pornography (shocking as this ( Read more... )