View the video here: YouTube - Nickelback - Savin’ Me, and tell me that isn’t the coolest concept you’ve seen for a music video in a long time.

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Well, I’ll do my part to help Patrick Moberg find the girl of his dreams — his website is basically a missed connection writ large and writ well.

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I was a buccaneer-type pirate for Halloween. Pictures are (believe it or not) forthcoming. What did you dress up as?

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Bruce Schneier makes some good points about the embarassing public displays of stupidity that culminate in a broken home front against terrorism. In his essay, The War on the Unexpected, he writes:

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

Here’s the crazy part: all of those examples, if you follow the link to view them on Schneier’s site, actually happened. Particularly interesting are his points about how law enforcement employees, fearful of losing their job, lose their common sense in the process.

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When I get home, I will be installing Foxit Reader, a replacement for Adobe’s terrifyingly bad PDF reader called… Reader. A quick description of the replacement:

Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.

Here’s the thing, that feature set listed above actually makes Foxit Reader superior to Adobe’s own offerings. I mean… it’s like someone other than Microsoft offering an alternative to Windows that works better than Windows. And Mykala, you still don’t have to worry about all this because, well, Macs come with built in software that reads PDFs.

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Slashdot has an article titled The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago; inevitably, the discussion turned to Cold War politics. I found this comment to be particularly interesting:

The pen is mightier than the sword: Often propaganda will work better than overt force. Shackle a man’s hands and he will try to break free, shackle his mind and he will never consider it.

This is the reason I consider false or sensationalist news more dangerous to the wellbeing of society than terrorism.

Discuss, if you’d like. Plus, in this fellow’s signature, he clarifies a spot of grammatical minutiae: i.e. is “that is,” while e.g. is “for example.” So, i.e. is never “for example.” Most educational comment I’ve read in a while — A+++ would read again!

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Welcome to the October Picture Vacuum. We’ve come up a bit short this month, but I’ll hop back on that horse. Photography will resume!

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Here’s an excerpt from “Stuff You Didn’t Know,” which (among other things) explains why English (though lacking grammatical gender), is still unbelievably difficult for non-native speakers:

The combination “ough” can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

Whoah. Perhaps Sagert could enlighten us with regard to other difficulties he sees from non-native speakers.

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“I do not have to build a perfect wall today. I just have to lay a perfect brick. Just lay one brick, dude.”

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My sister Katy is closing in on oral exams, which are an important milestone on her way to math Ph.D. stardom! With the goal of encouraging her, I’ve excerpted sentences from a recent Computerworld article about celebrities with math majors:

• “Art Garfunkel has a master’s in math from Columbia University.”
• “John Astin (the original Addams Family patriarch) studied math, not theater, at Johns Hopkins University, though he’s currently a professor in the latter department.”

But wait, there’s more!

• “Danica McKellar (Winnie, The Wonder Years)… is currently a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at UCLA; McKellar started UCLA as a film major but clicked with calculus and has since co-authored both a statistical mechanics paper that led to getting her name on a theorem (the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem) and a new book for middle schoolers, Math Doesn’t Suck.”

And of course, who could forget Tom Lehrer, who entered Harvard at 15. Here’s a good quote from him: “I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!”

So that’s it, Katy. I hope you’ve enjoyed this break from studying; remember, you can do it!

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