Philonoist.net

Saw this list of Twitter uses the other day; kudos to Olin for the top spot (though the list might be unranked) for the 3rd-Floor West Hall laundryroom Twitter agent. Anyone familiar with this know how it works? I don’t remember how the LaundryView system works, but if I recall correctly, there’s e-mail functionality. It’d be interesting to learn more. Reply in comments if you’ve got the details.

Before I switched over to full time software development,  I used to write functional specs for some of the applications at ATG. The most frustrating aspect of this wasn’t the text itself, since describing what happens when you click a button is pretty sweet, but being blocked waiting for the UI designer to update the wireframe models. He and I used Microsoft Visio, a bulky, awkward product on a good day, and we lost quite a few days to his creating prototypes. (It didn’t help that he was three time zones away.)

With balsamiq mockups, I think we could have definitely cut down on that; it looks impossibly spiffy and fast. It’s been a while since I’ve been on that side of things, so I’d be curious to see if any HFIDers out there have used this.  is it as amazing as it looks?

Check out the YouTube video for jaw-dropping prototypin’.

I was first exposed to Neil deGrasse Tyson a couple of weeks ago via this video on “stupid” design in which he argues that there can’t be a Creator if a Creator existed, it would have “unintelligent” among other attributes (see his comment below), since there’s a load of stuff out there (in the galaxy, on Earth, in our bodies) that will kill us. “This is no garden of Eden,” he states. Since then, I’ve seen his name a couple of times in print, and last week in New York, he hosted the pre-show video at the Hayden Planetarium on Cosmic Collisions. Then I learned that he hosts scienceNOW, a counterpart to the venerable PBS science show, NOVA.

So I finally got around to his Wikipedia page today, and found that in 2000, Tyson was voted the “sexiest Astrophysicist alive” by People Magazine.

‘Nuff friggen said.

As Steve Holt on Arrested Development would say… “STEVE HOLT”!

Oliners past and present are good at many a thing: we’ve built K’Nex Computers, travelled to Antarctica, and started companies. But if there’s one thing we’re terrible at, it’s blogging, at least from the point of view of Planet Olin. In its heyday, PO was damn near close to required reading; during one of Olin’s famous e-mail explosions, I decided to post my thoughts to my blog instead of send out another reply-all, and still got e-mail replies to it. (By the way, an e-mail explosion happened to great comedic effect at work the other week. Proof again that Olin is just a shadowy corporation that confers degrees and not an actual college. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s Corporation 40, College 38. But like 15 of those corporation points is using Exchange as a mail server for students. Current students, rejoice in the fact that once you do get a real job with a company larger than 100 people, you’ll get to heckle from the back during e-mail orientation.) Now it’s a down to a post every other day. The bottom’s fallen off.

So what happened? Now, I admit that not everyone is a blogger, and even those that are aren’t on PO. But now with at least half of PO’s contributing authors alumni instead of students, the drop-off is explainable: those alumni are out doing real world things that take real world time, instead of procrastinating on the latest problem set to write about 2005′s horrible Aeon Flux. I think those first students expected the future classes to take over the blogging for us, but that hasn’t happened. (Some notable exceptions exist) Maybe it will someday, who knows?

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been tied into some alumni events surrounding the close of the fiscal year and graduation. These events have made me realize two things. First, that the people from Olin are (to paraphrase, of all people, Dave Barrett) the best you’ll meet in your life. They’re certainly the smartest, but they’re also good conversationalists, willing to go the extra mile, and collectively, a great sense of humor. (Current students, mourn the fact that it’s all downhill from here.) And two, despite Facebook and LinkedIn and e-mail lists and blogs and all the other tools that make Austin virtually next door to Boston, there’s not enough conversation going on en masse, not enough many-to-many threads.

Some absurd percentage of Oliners will say something along the lines of “Some of the best conversations of my life happened at <N> a.m.” where <N> is some small natural number, certainly less than or equal to 4. I think we all shared in them, those random musings that come tandem with insomnia and certainly only under extreme academic tension. But those conversations stimulated us in an incredible fashion, inspired us, gave us that last extra push. (Caffeine also did that, albeit chemically.) And despite our collective thinking that those conversations die off as a function of distance, I don’t think that’s the case. I think we just need to make more of a conscious effort in having them in formats we’re not used to, in ways we never expected.

This machine may be able to add more numbers, but it’s still not as good as the K’Nex Calculator:

Technorati Tags: Woodworking

Sometime during my freshman year at Olin, the library called for submissions to create a list of 100 novels. In retrospect, I can’t recall why we felt we needed this list: lit readership was alive and well at Olin (thanks in no small part to Mel Chua), and with the Olin Library Community project (where each student selects a book for purchase) and Summer Reading (where in theory we all read a book and discuss it at the start of Fall term), a list of novels selected by members of the community, or even just students, seems superfluous.

I do remember that there was to be a challenge element to this: perhaps some sort of prize was going to be given to the student who read them all first.

At any rate, the list and the challenge died before sophomore year, but for old time’s sake, here is the draft list from which we were to pull the books, taken no doubt from the old Olin wiki, R.I.P. Some of these are classics, some classics of sci-fi, and others just Oliner’s favorite books: no parsed list ever came from these submissions, so this is perhaps an insight from those early days into either what we enjoyed reading, or what we thought we should be reading.

The ones in blue are the ones I’ve read:

100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1984 – George Orwell

A Day in the Life of Ivan Dennisovitch- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

All the Pretty Horses – Cormac Mccarthy

Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis

Beowulf – Seamus Heaney’s translation

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Byzantium – Stephen R. Lawhead

Candide – Voltaire

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean Auel

Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Connections – James Burke

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson

Dune – Frank Herbert

East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Eaters of the Dead – Ibn Fadlan (compiled by Michael Crichton)

Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Shadow – Orson Scott Card

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Fire and Hemlock – Dianna Wynne Jones

Five Smooth Stones – Ann Fairbairn

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein – Mary Shelly

Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter

Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Hedda Gabler – Henrik Ibsen

Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow

Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Hyperion et al – Dan Simmons

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

I, Asimov – Isaac Asimov

I, Robot – Isaac Asimov

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Islands in the Stream – Ernest Hemingway

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth – Chris Ware

Just So Stories for Little Children – Rudyard Kipling

Lamb – Christopher Moore

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Macbeth – William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

Men of Mathematics – Eric Temple Bell

Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs

Native Son – Richard Wright

Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! – Dr. Seuss

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Ordinary People – Judith Guest

Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

Picture This – Joseph Heller

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi

Rootabega Tales- Carl Sandburg

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard

She’s Not There – Jennifer Finney Boylan

Silas Marner – George Eliot

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Small Gods – Terry Pratchett

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder

Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Spoon River Anthology – Edgar Lee Masters

Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein

Tales of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl

The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath

The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

The Cider House Rules – John Irving

The Control of Nature – John Macphee

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

The Dancing Wu Li Masters – Gary Zukav

The Emigrants – Vilhelm Moberg

The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan

The First Circle – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Forever War – Joe Haldemann

The Giver – Lois Lowry

The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

The Iliad & The Odyssey – Homer

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery

The Man Who Planted Trees – Jean Giono

The Moon is Down – John Steinbeck

The Oedipus Cycle – Sophocles

The Old Man and The Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

The Red Tent – Anita Diamont

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Search for Delicious – Natalie Babbitt

The Second Tree from the Corner – E B White

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

The Stranger – Albert Camus

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

The Wonderful O – James Thurber

The World According to Garp – John Irving

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Trinity – Leon Uris

Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to the Monkey House – Kurt Vonnegut

Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak

Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig

Now I want to watch The Rock:

Technorati Tags: Radio Play

Kinky.

Many people have asked me during the last four years why I chose to re-brand myself as Joe during my time at Olin. I usually responded with: Because of Adam “Iceman” Horton, the original Adam at Olin… or because Joe is my middle name…. or because Joe College is really silly, irreverent, and a throw-back that the current generation doesn’t understand (parents loved this one), or ’cause that way I could tell who my friends are from the kids I went to undergrad with (kidding!). The truth, of course, is a little of all of those, and more: my dad did the same thing when he was a student, and I thought it would be fun to follow a bit in his footsteps.

Now that it’s all over, I think I’m gonna stick with Adam. Even with the entire school (including faculty, staff, and senior administrators) calling me Joe, I still felt like an Adam. There’ll be no admonishment for calling me Joe, I promise.

Also, I picked up a couple of new contact options: my full name, with middle initial and without spaces will either get you to me on AIM or via Gmail. Use these instead of older ones you may have lying around.