-
(Untitled)
Breaking my LiveJournal silence to note that my officemate of the day the other week was LiveJournal creator bradfitz. -
See you later, LJ!
I'm moving everything to just one blog. Too many Russian Spam ads of questionable content lie here. You can follow me at ( Read more... ) -
Impossible figures
Rather than ranting about the latest PhD drama (short version: no defense this month, but will defend this summer), I am instead posting about how to make impossible figures so that I can tell others and have it waste their time instead of my own ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
I am going periscope down. I will be offline until May to get done all the dissertation crap I need to do. If you see me commenting in some online forum or find me chatting online, a good response is "Stop this, Peter, because you need to be writing."
See you in May! -
Ada Lovelace Day
When you learn something about history, and you are kind of young, you tend to assume that the facts you are learning are things that everyone always knew. It's sometimes startling to find out how recently that was untrue, even among the people who should know. The example that drove this home for me was a professor of computer science in ( Read more... ) -
The economy is made up of real people
It turns out that unemployment is not funemployment for most people. For every percent increase in unemployment, 47,000 people die [1]. This is very very bad. This means that the increase from the 2006 low of 4.6 percent[2] to the current rate of 8.1 percent [3] our economy has killed more than 150,000 people. And the most optimistic economists ( Read more... ) -
Ringtones
What is a ringtone for? Answer: it is for you to be able to hear your cellular telephone ringing ( Read more... ) -
Computer science research.
Computer science is a very young field. This is sort of trivially true when you compare it to, say, philosophy and mathematics, but also has consequences for my daily life. One thing it means is that seemingly-obvious questions have often not been asked. With a BS in CS you are qualified to begin answering many of them, if the question is ( Read more... ) -
Old
They are selling upscale cars using songs and artists I thought were cool in high school and middle school. This feels like some kind of age milestone. -
(Untitled)
When did LiveJournal start having ads everywhere all the time, even though I've never opted in to them? Note that these ads only show up when I am NOT logged in, so they may have been there a long time. I like the aggregation of content that livejournal provides, but 3 separate banner ads is too much for me to feel good about supporting.