I got around to self-googling again in the office today, because I'm vain and generally bored at work. This time, one of the top hits was my attempt to pull off a bit of Colbert-style satire at the FSView & Florida Flambeau, where I used to work.
Somehow people got the wrong interpretation of my satire. I was just trying to rib a bit (ribbit) on an editorial I had seen published a few days prior, which was certainly not satirical. Nor was it even from our school -- which means our doofus of an editor-in-chief had picked it out himself.
Then, I decided to search for the name of the article itself: "Deport All Current Illegal Immigrants." This is what showed up -- a livejournal post from an FSU student. My favorite comment on the post is "Th... that's so outlandish it reads like satire." But, as I've said before, I wasn't able to make everyone understand my intent, which means my attempt at satire failed (for the majority of readers). Though, in fact, I tried to make it sound a lot like the "real" argument against immigrants, partially to show how ridiculous it is. But it still didn't work.
Then, I happened to read somewhere else where the author of the livejournal posted that she was excited that "science has deemed sarcasm an important survival skill," which I thought was funny and a little ironic, since she didn't understand my satire. But I hadn't heard of any recent news stories about this, so after yet another search, I found this gem: Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill (via this blog post about it).
This article is great, because it has a person who doesn't understand sarcasm getting eaten by a lion. Gold.
But it is interesting that Ms. Small is defending sarcasm as a sign of evolutionary development. Humor, I can see, but sarcasm? Sure, why not. Sounds like a great theory. But, no, seriously...
It reminded me of this exchange:
Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? It's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense.
Hobbes, walking away: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
Calvin, now alone: I can't tell if that's funny or really scary.
(source)
So go ahead and try to not take everything so seriously today. Especially if it's satire.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Google Story.
My current reading is by David Vise and Michael Malseed.
The authors are journalists from The Washington Post and therefore is fairly straightforward and . . . journalistic. I enjoy the style.
The first half of the book was pretty entertaining -- it went through the background of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, once rival Stanford Ph.D. students, now multi-billionaires. It was interesting because I didn't know anything about the story, or how hot Stanford was (is) in computer science and how the scene benefited from being close to Silicon Valley as well as being close to some venture capitalists. Also interesting was that Stanford specifically fostered an atmosphere where star students were encouraged to work on commercial ventures with their professors, who would take a stake in their students' companies and become stinking rich. There was a point where a Stanford student said that it was hard to go to parties, because there would always be people around offering them a high-paying job to quit school and work for them.
And although Page and Brin came from a strong background of academia, they were "forced" to leave grad school to manage their system because only they could do it right. Boo hoo.
But now the book is slowing down in the second half. I just read an entire chapter on different people that use and love Google. But I just hit another fascinating part, actually, about when Gmail was unveiled.
Apparently, everyone went Chicken Little on the guys because they thought that having an entire gigabyte of storage for everyone would lend itself to government evil-doings (personal privacy for email messages only lasted 180 days). Congressmen introduced state legislature against Gmail, there were petitions, the whole deal. No one seemed to address the fact that this was a voluntary service -- and free at that. In fact, there were only 1,000 accounts available at first, just to test it out and make it generate some mystique.
If you don't want to allow yourself to be tracked (another big issue was scanning Gmail messages to display relevant ads), just don't use the service. Everyone else complaining that this sort of service would snowball and soon everyone would be at risk everywhere are morons. Gmail has only made others try harder on what is still lousy online email services.
There are a few things that are not explained. I would have preferred a more detailed, slightly more technical explanation of the Google search method. But it does say that the guys started out using a lot of cheap parts and building a string of cheap personal pcs, linked with custom-written software. And then they just started downloading every page of the internet so they could search through it quickly. Which is pretty ingenious.
Also, apparently all of this background information is online too.
Whoa, and so is your Google History.
The authors are journalists from The Washington Post and therefore is fairly straightforward and . . . journalistic. I enjoy the style.
The first half of the book was pretty entertaining -- it went through the background of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, once rival Stanford Ph.D. students, now multi-billionaires. It was interesting because I didn't know anything about the story, or how hot Stanford was (is) in computer science and how the scene benefited from being close to Silicon Valley as well as being close to some venture capitalists. Also interesting was that Stanford specifically fostered an atmosphere where star students were encouraged to work on commercial ventures with their professors, who would take a stake in their students' companies and become stinking rich. There was a point where a Stanford student said that it was hard to go to parties, because there would always be people around offering them a high-paying job to quit school and work for them.
And although Page and Brin came from a strong background of academia, they were "forced" to leave grad school to manage their system because only they could do it right. Boo hoo.
But now the book is slowing down in the second half. I just read an entire chapter on different people that use and love Google. But I just hit another fascinating part, actually, about when Gmail was unveiled.
Apparently, everyone went Chicken Little on the guys because they thought that having an entire gigabyte of storage for everyone would lend itself to government evil-doings (personal privacy for email messages only lasted 180 days). Congressmen introduced state legislature against Gmail, there were petitions, the whole deal. No one seemed to address the fact that this was a voluntary service -- and free at that. In fact, there were only 1,000 accounts available at first, just to test it out and make it generate some mystique.
If you don't want to allow yourself to be tracked (another big issue was scanning Gmail messages to display relevant ads), just don't use the service. Everyone else complaining that this sort of service would snowball and soon everyone would be at risk everywhere are morons. Gmail has only made others try harder on what is still lousy online email services.
There are a few things that are not explained. I would have preferred a more detailed, slightly more technical explanation of the Google search method. But it does say that the guys started out using a lot of cheap parts and building a string of cheap personal pcs, linked with custom-written software. And then they just started downloading every page of the internet so they could search through it quickly. Which is pretty ingenious.
Also, apparently all of this background information is online too.
Whoa, and so is your Google History.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The life and times of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Today a graduate student who comes into my office every so often started telling me his life story. He is a bit of a talker who is hard to get away from. Especially if your job involves staying at your desk.
But this time I was glad to let him talk. He told me about how he got his bachelors in humanities in 1976, then tried going to grad school for philosophy but dropped out ("for one reason or another"). Soon, on a fluke, he found himself getting involved in computer science, and as he did odd jobs and such, he ended up pursuing a masters in CS in the early '80s.
He then worked as a computer programmer and consultant for close to twenty years when, all of a sudden in 2001, according to him, "the bottom fell out." He was finishing up a typical consulting job, which are by nature short-lived employments, and then he went out to find another gig, which he had been able to do within a couple of weeks between jobs before. But everyone he called in Chicago (where he had lived and worked) either said that they weren't hiring or that the person he knew at the firm had retired or gotten replaced. All of his contacts were suddenly absent, and his savings dwindled until he decided to move back in with his parents in Florida.
Now, at who knows what age (hint: obvious combover), he plods along in graduate studies in history. He partly chose history to get away from the quickly paced "technical business" where everyone wanted someone with six months of experience in the newest version of software. He viewed history as more stable, more reliable -- as he said, "The South isn't going to win the civil war because of some new discovery in history".
Then, he asked about me and we chatted some shit about cognitive science (where artificial intelligence meets cognitive psychology) and I told him I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I don't. But I know one thing -- that I don't want something like this to happen to me. And God willing, it won't.
But this time I was glad to let him talk. He told me about how he got his bachelors in humanities in 1976, then tried going to grad school for philosophy but dropped out ("for one reason or another"). Soon, on a fluke, he found himself getting involved in computer science, and as he did odd jobs and such, he ended up pursuing a masters in CS in the early '80s.
He then worked as a computer programmer and consultant for close to twenty years when, all of a sudden in 2001, according to him, "the bottom fell out." He was finishing up a typical consulting job, which are by nature short-lived employments, and then he went out to find another gig, which he had been able to do within a couple of weeks between jobs before. But everyone he called in Chicago (where he had lived and worked) either said that they weren't hiring or that the person he knew at the firm had retired or gotten replaced. All of his contacts were suddenly absent, and his savings dwindled until he decided to move back in with his parents in Florida.
Now, at who knows what age (hint: obvious combover), he plods along in graduate studies in history. He partly chose history to get away from the quickly paced "technical business" where everyone wanted someone with six months of experience in the newest version of software. He viewed history as more stable, more reliable -- as he said, "The South isn't going to win the civil war because of some new discovery in history".
Then, he asked about me and we chatted some shit about cognitive science (where artificial intelligence meets cognitive psychology) and I told him I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I don't. But I know one thing -- that I don't want something like this to happen to me. And God willing, it won't.
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