The Stanford Flipside iPhone App is Here!

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Download the Stanford Flipside iPhone app!

and watch the commercial!

A Fun Chatroulette Video — Piano Improv to Strangers

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Small But Growing List of Words Computer Science (and probably Math people) Use Too Much

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non-trivial
This is used to describe something that most people would just call “hard.” However cs people need to make sure to tell you that it’s actually “not extremely easy.” You will probably find a cs person using non-trivial where it should not be used. For example, “Doing the laundry is completely non-trivial.”

well-defined
ambiguous
These two go together. Well-defined and ambiguos usually refer to descriptions of problems, but cs people can really use them for anything. “I’m not sure if my wants and needs are well-defined.” “The solution to your girl problems is ambiguos.”

What other words do cs people use too much?

Look over there! It’s Balloon Boy

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A REVEALING TALE ABOUT MISDIRECTED ATTENTION IN THE MEDIA

As I sat down to write a new article for the Flipside, I went to do my so-called “research.”

Today, I decided, the perfect topic to write about was this so-called “Balloon Boy.” When balloon boy came up in our meeting and we brainstormed ideas about it, I realized this was just an unbelievable topic to satirize. Mainly–when things that happen in the real world seem fake, you know the opportunity is ripe for irony and satire.

Let me explain a little more.

I went to go read more about what happened with this balloon boy so I could come up with some sort of coherent viewpoint and a set of ideas and a perspective for my writing. I searched Google for balloon boy and started to read some articles, and while doing so, realized how this event is extremely meta.

My one sentence take: The balloon boy incident is really about how a hoax fooled the media, and then fooled the rest of us, and in doing so, succeeded in its publicity stunt.

So why was reading the news on this meta? Well, the news is exactly what caused and blew up the problem in the first place. I was reading these reports which were the source of all the fuss initially.

So where to look for credible information? I think the answer to this very important question is not where to look, but how to look. We look when someone points, that is kind of a given of human behavior. But I think the thing we can control and the thing we should work on is to look carefully. Look slowly and think over the timing, the source, and the motivation of the information.

At the end of this, I am still unsure what to make fun of about balloon boy, but it is a very interesting topic to think about how the media can lead us astray. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no… it’s Balloon boy!

See my research paper on critical reading here
See an article with similar ideas from the wall street journal here

Funny Things at Stanford

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This is not really a long story, but I think it’s sort of interesting. I was going to turn in my physics problem set with my friend, and on my way there, I saw a crew of three or four people with a very large camera doing something. It looked sort of interesting, so I casually asked them what they were filming. They said they were from BBC and shooting a documentary on the web. I said ‘cool’ and then as I was leaving, one of the main guys asked, ‘hey would you like to be interviewed?’ I agreed and about 15 minutes later I was being interviewed for (possible) inclusion in BBC documentary about the web.

So, why was this funny?

1) Because there’s always all this random stuff going on here.
2) Because when they started to interview me and then my friend Eric, they had this whole twist about how corporations may be involved in the CS department, how does it affect you that the CS department has billionaires, or what do you think about the companies… etc.

After thinking about this for a little while afterward, I think the thing that was funniest to me is that I feel the CS department here is very traditionalist, and really looks down on pandering to industry. This is why they have been slow to adopt classes about the web, because it is looked down upon by real computer scientists. This was rather ironic, since many Stanford computer science students go from “pure academia” right out to cs industry. Just something to think about.

Computer Wizards

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Great shared article from my friend Patrick, this is a little cartoon about tech support for “non-computer people.” A lot of times, people don’t realize how easy a computer problem may be (aka, just trying to solve it for one minute or googling it).