There was an interesting article in the NYT recently (which I saw via Eduwonk) about how No Child Left Behind is draining funding from "gifted" programs in elementary and middle schools. I have weird reactions to education policy, I think primarily due to the fact that back in Vermont the public schools, while not amazing, were certainly pretty ( Read more... )

Dad just sent me a cool article in the New York Times about Mad River. I've been skiing there since I was about five or six, and it really is an amazing place.

Is anyone else reminded of the Mandelbrot set by the cover of the Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Yes it's nerdy, but that was definitely my first reaction to the album art. The Mandlebrot set is so amazingly cool.

More beer blogging: the Times has an article on brown ales, which I'm a fan of. And guess what -- their number three was the Long Trail Double Bag Ale, from back home in Vermont. I tend to like Magic Hat a bit more than Long Trail, but the Double Bag is really good.

Yesterday was one of the GSA happy hours in the UC. For some reason I've never managed to make it to one of the UC happy hours, even though I go to nearly all of the off-campus happy hours. Instead of a generic happy hour, though, they decided to do bar trivia. I put together a team at the last minute consisting of myself, Serge, Swapnil, Mike, ( Read more... )

Not too much going on lately. Break was pretty fun -- I spent a few weeks in Ohio with the family, which is always relaxing. Every time I visit I'm amazed at how old my cousins Sam and Marissa are. They're the youngest of my generation, so I think of them as being really little, but Sam is in 8th grade now and Marissa is in (I think) 3rd. It's ( Read more... )

Keith Olbermann is the man. Countdown is far and away the best news show currently on TV.

My little brother Tom just got accepted early decision to Colgate! Congratulations Tom!

On a funny side note, when I just googled for him the second hit was a Halo 2 montage of him and his friends. Awesome.

Luca's post on group representations for expander constructions is really cool. I know zero representation theory, but the idea of representing a group as a collection of linear operators is really cool. Especially with his example of the cyclic group, it's a very natural thing to do, although I certainly have never thought of cyclic groups that ( Read more... )

Yesterday was probably one of the most enjoyable days I've had this year. We had our architecture poster session from 12-3, which went shockingly well. Don is an Adobe Illustrator wiz, so we had the best looking poster in the room. And apparently Nikos wasn't lying when he said that Babak would like our project -- when Babak came by he said that ( Read more... )