voting for the under dog

often times, people don't vote because they think the person they support doesn't have a realistic chance of winning. but, i think you should vote anyway, because:

1. even if the candidate doesn't win, if he/she has a strong number of votes, that sends a message to the American people. it shows that many people support the candidate's views, and thus next time, people are more likely to take him/her (or someone similar) more seriously. this is especially important for third-party candidates.

2. for phone-polls, they only call people who voted last year. so if you don't vote, you're sacrificing your vote in the polls. sure, it doesn't seem that important, but people (unfortunately) pay attention to these polls. a lot of Ron Paul supporters (like myself) don't get called because they didn't vote last year - now, we're facing the consequences of that because RP's popularity is not properly reflected in the polls.

duality

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, recently gave a talk here at Cornell. in summary, "nintendo is awesome and the wii prints money" - fair enough. but at the end, he was asked what's the most important thing for achieving success? he said there was no single thing, no silver bullet, no secret to success. but he did offer a piece of advice i found pretty solid...

appreciate the duality of values. that is, be able to hold values that are strictly opposed to each other yet exercise them all when appropriate. for example, passion and dedication are important values. but equally important is to know when to quit and not let your passions blind you - that is, to be pragmatic. teamwork and tolerance are also important values. but equally important is to know when to go against the flow and stand-out against the majority. so as with most things in life, it is important to have the right balance of values.

not quite as simple or catchy as one-liner advice that most ppl give, like "follow your dreams and everything will turn out alright!" or "you can only rely on yourself!" but a lot more realistic, i think.

wasted time

pride can waste you a lot of time. as a first year phd, i have a lot to learn, since almost every week i encounter something new thanks to my research project. but, being full of intellectual pride, i rarely ask for help - surely i can figure it out on my own!

i'll spare the details, but i probably just spent a whole week doing insanely pain-in-the-ass calculations. then today, i had my weekly meeting with my prof...he showed me a much better way. turns out, you can do it in like 15 minutes using these things called "computers"...

wasted time = 1 week - 15 minutes. me = pwned (but a little wiser).

time management

...i'm pretty bad at it. here are 2 videos that i can relate to, cuz they're both about bad time management:

"Saturday"
"Procrastination"

so, what have we learned? you really need to just do whatever you need to do and stop thinking about it so much. bad news for us thinking folk, eh? stop thinking so much! it's hard, i know. maybe put a cap on how much you think about something before doing it - like 5 minutes.

politics - student gets tazered at john kerry talk

if you haven't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqAVvlyVbag

think about it for a bit and let it settle in. what does this mean for our country?

i don't think there's anything conspiratorial going on here. i don't think kerry's people removed him cuz of the probing questions - the security guards were doing their job cuz he was breaking the rules of the event.

however, i do have a problem with the rules. the first amendment guarantees that the government will never suppress free speech, but it seems like we americans do a fine job suppressing ourselves anyway. don't say anything controversial at work, cuz you may get fired! or in this case, don't try to make a lengthy point at the mic cuz you may get forcefully removed! this isn't about the first amendment and law - it's about free speech in our culture (as reflected by the rules of such events) - or there lack of.

on the BBC, there was one event where tony blair and a member of the audience were literally shouting at each other. was that against their rules? hell no - it was damn good television!

american political culture is tragically restrained. this has the de facto effect of suppressing free speech and making politics generally dull and boring, motivating the population to censor itself. perfectly constitutional, but pathetically unhealthy.

life in ithaca so far

i've been here for over a month now, so here's the 411 so far

pros:
- ithaca's natural beauty goes pretty well with its hot and humid summer weather. nothing like cliff diving in to one of ithaca's many gorges!
- cornell's student theater is awesome - cheap, and great selection of indie movies
- lotsa stuff to do on campus. i plan on doing hockey and swing dancing on a regular basis
- my office mates - all girls - are a pretty entertaining group to work around
- academically, i'm learning a ton
- my room is HUGE

cons:
- summer's over soon, so i expect it'll get balls-clinking cold in a month or two
- i've started on a research project, which is great, but i'm expected to produce results by january. this means that unless i finish early (read: work my ass off), my winter break will be compromised...
- disappointingly, very few of the first year PhDs are enthusiastic drinkers ('alcoholic' is such a strong word...)

so all in all, things are going well and i'm diggin it over here!

tech culture - computers as tools

computers are pretty amazing tools, but they're still just tools. yet, there's a certain mystique about them in our culture. for example, people often say, "it would be very slow for a human to calculate this, but a computer could do it almost instantly!" contrast this with how people talk about, say, hammers: "it would be very painful and slow for a human to knock this nail in, but with a hammer one could do it almost instantly!" the difference being the "with a hammer" as opposed to just the hammer by itself.

perhaps this kind of thinking promotes laziness amongst computer users. culturally, we expect computers to be autonomous, thus we don't bother learning the tools in much depth (how often do you read, much less write, software documentation?). yet if you just got a new power saw, you'd spend a few days learning the thing and reading the manual. maybe we need computers and software that could potentially cut off a limb or two if you don't use it properly. in the long run, maybe that'd save us tons of frustration and head ache?

software idea - facebook 'bets' app

how bout a facebook app that keeps track of bets between you and your friends? imagine logging in and seeing in the newsfeed, "Bob lost a bet to Jim! Now Bob has to come to class in his boxers!" or like, "Your friend Johnson has proposed a bet..."

software engineering - maintainable global variables using stacks

problem: global variables (and static singletons) are convenient for stuff that all functions/classes probably need to access (loggers, database connections, profilers). it's painful to pass all these around as arguments. but, it can also be painful if you want to temporarily change those variables (for example, if you want to temporarily log to a different file for a certain function call).

solution: for each global variable, make a stack. so instead of declaring "int x;" declare "stack x;". when you use it, just use the top element. when you need to change it temporarily, push on a new value, and pop it after you're done.

idea from: OpenGL does exactly this, as the whole library is just global state (you NEVER pass around any GL objects). you push/pop matrices, attribute sets, etc. it works quite well and looks very clean . LISP also does this when you use 'let' and bind to a global variable. it'll push your new value, and actually pop it out for you when the 'let' expression is done (ergo, lisp is awesome).