Uncategorized Category
Jul 19 | Feedback, feedforward
Wired's July edition has a piece on feedback loops, the precise kind of thing I had been investigating with Neema for the past year.
Jun 9 | Aerial video from Stanford’s campus
I flew my MultiWii quadcopter on campus today:
There were a few crashes along the way, but the nice thing about post-processing is that I can edit it out :).
Oct 22 | The problem with the home button
There are some things that become so common to do that it's easy to forget why there's a problem to begin with.
Sep 27 | TechCrunch Hackathon SF Highlights
I found out about TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday and motivated by a way to get in without forking over the $3000 entry fee (or even $200 for students), I found out about the accompanying Hackathon.
Aug 23 | 3530 miles and more to go
The trip across the United States from Massachusetts to San Jose will likely be long and unforgiving, but there are many aspects I'm looking forward to.
Mar 3 | Chile vs. Haiti (infographic)
Click for larger version.
Feb 28 | Across the Olympic finish line
It's great now that video replays are common we can all share in snippets of the wonderful Olympics (never mind the fact that the only US licensed provider of live streaming and video from the Olympics is NBC).
Dec 13 | Quarant-ine?
There are some things about languages that really catches me off guard - the last time I felt this way was when people suggested to me that the Tower of Babel was the origins for the word "babble": it turns out likely not to be the case, but still it had my head whirling for a bit.
Now as I was reading about how the Channel Island of Sark is about to abolish feudalism (and also how a one-man invasion attempt in 1990 was stopped by the volunteer constable) and I came across the following interesting fact:
quarantine (to isolate an item, person, for the purposes of control of unwanted disease) has its origins in the French number for forty (quarante) with a reference dating from the 1500s describing the "period of 40 days in which a widow has the right to remain in her dead husband's house".
Jun 22 | What’s Happening?
"The Happening" lends itself to a series of unfortunate puns (like "what's happening? There's something terrible happening!) and the acting falls truly flat on its face: I'm not a big fan of closeups and repeated sequences of Mark Wahlberg telling everyone to shut up, not to mention the fact that Zooey Deschanel, after a pitiful presence in The Hitchhiker's Guide, continues to be as boring as ever.
However, there is something worthy of note that the BBC picked up on in a completely unrelated report on "One Planet" called Bees and disease in which they report on the real and undeniable truth that bees are strangely disappearing from their hives.
Mar 14 | 3/14: Pi Day
In honor of π day, listen to comedy/parody musical duo Hard N Phirm's Pi:
When ink and pen in hands of men
Inscribe your form, bipedal "P"
They draw an altar on which
God has slaughtered all stability
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint
And yet to see you all at once we only need the point
Flirting with infinity, your geometric progeny
That fit inside you oh so tight
With triangles that feel so right...