Quality Wasted Time

When I first started this blog, its mandate was to talk about engineering-lifestyle things, like freaking out about midterms and being jealous of MIT. I've strayed a bit from that ideal over the years, but I'd like to get back to it now with a discussion about the quintessential student pastime of wasting time on the internet.

Now, since you're reading my blog, I'm going to take it for granted that you already appreciate the benefits of spending time on online activities that are not, strictly speaking, useful. With that in mind, we can skip the moral questioning and get straight to the fun stuff: did you know you can download parts of Wikipedia as books?

It's true. I'm not referring to WikiBooks either, which are notoriously incomplete and haphazardly edited, but actual PDFs/ODT files/ZIM files/physical books made from the content of Wikipedia itself.

This might not sound like that much of a time waster, because navigating Wikipedia the conventional way is probably even more of a time waster due to all the link-hopping. Reading a book of encyclopedia articles could also be considered a constructive use of time. To both of these objections I present: this six hundred page book of chess variants. Clearly this is a waste of time and something I would never have wasted time on before it became possible to load onto an e-reader.

So you now have a couple thousand new books to read (starting, perhaps, with Philosophy of Science, Neuroscience, LGBT themes in science fiction, fantasy and horror, Consciousness, Complex Dynamics, or University Genetics). Interestingly, Creationism and Intelligent Design is one of the larger books, probably because the arguments, lawsuits, and politics involved are distressingly entertaining.

Moving along, I've also taken to wasting a fair amount of time on the Khan Academy site. Again, studying mathematics through a tutoring site (an incredibly good tutoring site with video tutorials from one instructor spanning topics from basic addition to vector calculus) might seem like a benign time waster, but I assure you it is quite possible to spend far too long there.

For one thing, the Khan Academy has discovered that the future is games and uses a gaming-inspired reward system to motivate students to study more. This only affects people who log into the site (with a Google or Facebook account) but should you be so unwise as to do so, you'll suddenly have the option to gain lots of points by watching video lectures and answering simple interactive math tests. Since the tests are aimed more at the elementary level than the university level, it is quite possible to gain ludicrous amounts of utterly meaningless points in the span of a few hours if you're willing to answer lots of arithmetic questions. I don't personally recommend doing this but, having done it, I have a renewed appreciation for not having to manually multiply dozens of three-digit number pairs together for homework anymore.

Seriously though, Khan Academy has a lot of good stuff for anyone who wants to learn stuff (mostly math, but there's a couple biology, chemistry, and history videos available for good measure). It's a similar type of time waster as watching lots of TED talks and you can even combine the two by watching a TED talk about Khan Academy.

In other news, I have a free unlimited internet connection and am really good at arithmetic again for no apparent reason.

In actual other news: brains, concepts, plasticity, self-organizing, going to CogSci 2011 woohoo, Shad BrainLab, iGEM, software, interfaces, coding Saturday, going to be awesome, can't say much about any of these things, but they're all awesome.

GUID Socks: Closer to Reality

Waaaaaaay back in the day, I wrote about creating pairs socks tagged with globally unique identifiers (GUIDS) that would allow you to match up pairs of socks for neat, orderly folding. I remember being pretty enamored by the idea the time and started working on some spiffy second-generation designs where the GUID was translated into visually distinct patterns. I even had the beginnings of a promotional website made, to sell the world on the wonders of cryptographically secure socks.

Alas, that idea has yet to fully come to fruition, but as I was deleting some spam comments from older entries of this blog, I stumbled on this gem of a comment from someone going by the moniker 'Jon':

Hi, I got the very same idea and decided to google it and ended up here.

The question here is how to automatically feed the sock machine with new data for every pair. I need to check with a manufacturer if its possible. :)

Sometimes, the internet is pretty awesome.

Crazy Unicode Characters

1. ‽ : the interrobang, usually written '?!', has been combined into a single character.
2. ☃ : the unicode snowman, as seen on unicodesnowmanforyou.com.
3. ☠ : skull and crossbones.
4. ☭ : hammer and sickle.
5. ✌ : victory hand.
6. ㎔ : the symbol for terahertz (and you were writing THz, like a sucker)
7. ㎯ : the character for radians per squared second.
8. ☂ : umbrella.
9. ☄ : shooting star, supposedly.
10. ☏ : telephone.

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Unicode face.

EDIT: There's a crazy new emoticon floating around Facebook that uses some truly perplexing characters:

⎝⏠⏝⏠⎠

Knight to C3

One of the guy's in my house is quite good at chess. He doesn't actually have spiked hair or a mohawk, or look in any way similar to either of the characters above, but he's pretty intimidating nonetheless. Case in point: he's supposedly played, and beaten, a grandmaster in speed chess online.

In two-on-one anti-chess (where the goal is to have all your pieces taken), we did manage to beat him though. I've yet to play a real chess game against him, but after soundly beating him at foosball today, a retaliatory chess match can't be too far away. I guess it's time to start training by turning up the difficulty level on my computer's chess program. On second thought, it's actually time to do a circuit's lab and lots of homework... but after that: chess showdown.

(Also: iGEM competition next weekend. It will be awesome. More details to come.)

EDIT: I won! It may not have been a particularly representative match, as he was goaded into attempting a ten move checkmate (which backfired) by the spectators of the game, but I'll take it. The next game will undoubtedly by harder.

Procrastination Tale

I had an assignment due at 11:45 tonight. Checking my watch, I was disturbed to see it read 9:26. Then I realized I was looking at it upside down. I had a good laugh and turned it around.

Then I realized I'm an idiot.

WIE!

While half researching and half procrastinating on a professional development assignment (oh yes, we have professional development assignments... but that's a whole other blog post) I stumbled upon another blog called "This is What an Engineer Looks Like".

It seems to be a collective blog written by various women in engineering most of whom seem to go to my school (the University of Waterloo). So there you go, check it out.

EDIT: I forgot to explain what 'WIE' is: it's an abbreviation of "Women In Engineering" and is the name of various organizations dedicated to the women who study engineering, the largest of which is probably IEEE WIE.

Data Structure (Exam Tomorrow)

Two exams down, three remaining. Next up: data structures and algorithms. Yay, b-trees.

12.5

12.5 hours remain until my first exam. Hence the twitter-sized post.

The Beginning

Some people make New Year's resolutions on January 1^st. Others use the Asian or lunar calendars, or even the beginning of a school year as a time to reflect and set new goals and lofty ambitions.

For my part, I find mid-February during my school's reading week to be particularly conducive to resolutions. This is a time of relaxation, when the overwhelming flood of work from school is temporarily (oh so temporarily) held at bay and there is suddenly time to contemplate life after assignments. It is also a foreboding time, with midterm exams looming and grades hanging in the air. Together, boredom and guilt are very strong motivators, matched only by years of procrastination experience to channel the need to be productive away from studies and into wild ventures such as acting a musical, building a snowman, or starting a blog.

So here we are.