The End of Early Action

You may or may not have heard Harvard’s decision to end Early Action, the program which allows applicants to apply earlier and also get an earlier, but non-binding decision from a school. While I don’t think this makes really that much of a difference (especially as Harvard has been revealed to be the top choice of students), this has apparently been on the minds of many colleges.

The amusing thing, to me, is that Harvard is being the first college to do this because:

“The old adage is, ‘When Harvard sneezes, everyone else gets pneumonia,’” said Bruce Breimer, school principal and director of college relations at the Collegiate School in New York. “It’s going to cause everyone else to re-evaluate.”

There’s an adage for that?

Why Medical School is Like High School

Got this off a facebook group (this seems most pertinent to USC Med school)

1. We have to get up at 6:45 am and drive to school
2. We have lunch together at 12 on the quad
3. We have lockers
4. We are in the same room everyday
5. There are lunch clubs
6. The same people are officers in every club
7. The dating pool is extremely small
8. Everyone has the same classes and you can’t drop any o fthem
9. Everyone knows everyone else
10. There’s a prom
11. For girls, the skirts get shorter and the shirts get lower
12. For guys, spitwads are an acceptable form of entertainment in lecture
13. We carpool to school
14. “I still can’t make eye contact with the girls in our class”
15. two words: class elections
16. we have homerooms and homeroom teachers
17. why its like the 3rd grade: we have cubbies and desks with our names on it
18. if something happens before lunch, everyone knows about it by the end of the day
19. we see each other everyday in class, but that doesn’t stop us from hanging out on the weekends

Facebook Mini-Feed: Why I Don’t Think It’s a Problem and What To Do if You Do

It seems very amusing to me that there has been such a huge backlash against Facebook for the mini-feed feature. Yes, it makes it easier to stalk people, but to be frank, it’s not as if any of this information that is being published in the mini-feed is actually private. All of the information: relationship status change, who you friend, who you write wall comments on — all of it is accessible as long as you’re friends with someone. If anything, this is much more useful than checking my Friends page for vague “[person X] has updated their profile” comments. So what’s the big deal?

If you’re worried, then simple:
a. Don’t make frequent changes to your facebook account
b. De-friend people that you don’t want access to your mini-feed
c. This should have been a real concern from the moment you signed up for Facebook, but DON’T put stuff up there that you don’t want found out

Now, if you’re REALLY REALLY worried, and you use Firefox, get the Greasemonkey extension (which allows you to load scripts that can be found on http://userscripts.org/) and install the Facebook Mini-Feed Killer script.

Me? I’m looking forward to finding out how many times Jeb can change his relationship status in one day.

Lex Luthor and Joker in Top 10 Favorite Villains

So says the Big Bad Read poll. Magneto came in at 11. And although I’ve never read it and not technically a comicbook villain, one of Neil Gaiman’s creations, The Other Mother (from his novel Coraline) came in at 7.

The Top 20:
1. Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)
2. Sauron, The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
3. Mrs. Coulter, His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
4. Lex Luthor, Superman (DC Comics)
5. The Joker, Batman (DC Comics)
6. Count Olaf, A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket)
7. The Other Mother, Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
8. The White Witch, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
9. Dracula, Dracula (Bram Stoker)
10. Artemis Fowl, Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer)
11. Magneto, X-Men (Marvel Comics)
12. Prof. Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
13. Zaphod Beeblebrox, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
14. Capt. Hook, Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie)
15. Napoleon the Pig, Animal Farm (George Orwell)
16. Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
17. Miss Trunchbull, Matilda (Roald Dahl)
18. Cruella de Vil, 101 Dalmations (Dodie Smith)
19. The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum)
20. The Grinch, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Dr. Seuss)

Poor Magneto … he got beaten out by an albino witch =/

Strong Angel III and LuLu.com

I mentioned in a previous post about Google Earth’s efforts in Katrina about the amazing capacity for modern technology, especially information technology (IT, its not just for outsourcing to India), to devolve power from centralized bodies, letting private institutions and individuals act locally on levels never imagined before. Someone who worked at Google kindly left a comment on my blog mentioning another of Google’s projects inspired by their efforts in Katrina, Strong Angel III, to demonstrate what public-private partnerships can do in response to disasters. While previously, Strong Angel was a demonstration of civilian-military cooperative efforts in response to conflict scenarios, Strong Angel III was designed to see what larger partnerships could do in response to disaster scenarios (ie terrorist attack, hurricane, etc). Remarkably, if you check their objective list, you’ll find that not only did traditional deployment/civilian-military communications make the list of goals, but a huge number of internet, cell phone, and technological issues were looked into as integral parts of making disaster relief efforts more local and hence, more effective and prompt.

On the subject of IT changing the way society works, as I mentioned before, the dawn of the printing press made it no longer possible for governments to exercise complete autocratic authority — not when thousands of printing presses were churning out historical records and opinion pieces. This has only expanded in recent years with the internet revolution, as now, with instant messenging and the world-wide-web and blogging, people are, more than ever, free to write what they want and put it out there for the world to see. Its not just the elite who have access to this power anymore. The Google Blog recently described the publishing by a prominent blogger of a book called “55 Ways to Have Fun With Google” describing some fun google things that some people have heard of (ie Google Fight) and some of the lesser known things (ie Google Snake). That in and of itself is rather amusing, but the really cool thing was that the book was self-published with a new publishing service called Lulu.com which allows you to submit digital manuscripts for printing and publication and for listing on Google Book Search (which by the way now has copies of out-of-copyright books all for free!) and Amazon.

viva la internet!

More Firefox

In a previous post, I explained some of the multiple reasons that I love firefox and gave a list of some of the most useful extensions that I use. As I am always discovering new things, here are some of the additional discoveries I’ve made with Firefox which have made it all the more useful for me:

1. Gmail Skins – For those who use gmail, Gmail skins allows you to customize the look of your gmail UI. It sounds like it wouldn’t be very helpful, but my experience would say otherwise. I’ve turned the navigation/command bar traditionally on the left-hand-side and converted it to a one-line menu which I’ve moved to the top of the page. I’ve also disabled the invitations manager (who doesn’t have a gmail account these days?), used a new color theme (because I don’t like Google’s default), and added a side-bar to my gmail window where you can link the left-hand column of your google personal page as a side-bar to your gmail window. In my case, I’ve put access to my google calendar, my google reader feed, and the local weather — all to make gmail, which has now become my email client more or less, more useful
2. BugMeNot – BugMeNot is a service which allows you to bypass compulsory web registration on a variety of online websites and magazines by supplying free, public passwords and usernames [no premium accounts, sorry] for a variety of webpages (ie New York Times, Washington Post, etc). The BugMeNot extension lets you quickly right-click on websites to just throw in BugMeNot access information so you never have to trouble yourself with that.
3. Mouse Gestures – Tim Cheng recommended these to me, and they work very well. Basically, they key your browser so that it senses specific commands from your mouse. For instance, if I hold the right mouse button down and drag to the left or to the right, I move forward or backwards in the history. If I make a L-shape while holding the right button down, I close the current window or tab, if I drag up, I create a new tab, if I drag down, I create a new window — and you get the idea. There’s even a place to download new gestures, if you want more. I’ll admit I don’t use all the gestures, but I have found the gestures make it very easy to handle multi-tab browsing, especially when I don’t feel like using keyboard shortcuts.
4. Keyword browsing – I mentioned before that I am a big fan of the bookmark system in firefox as it allows me to assign keywords, letting me type “reader” to get to my google reader page, “gmail” to get to my gmail page, among others. But, it was a pain to enter keywords, because Firefox, by default, does not let you enter keywords. You have to right-click on the bookmark, select “properties”, and then enter the information. The OpenBook extension changes that — now, by default, you can enter a keyword for every bookmark.
5. Additionally, I have discovered that Firefox has keyword searching as well. Its difficult to describe in any other way than in usage, but, if I wanted to search for directions to San Francisco International Airport, before I would type “maps.google.com” and then type in “SFO” in the search bar. Now, in the location bar (which you can get to with a simple Alt+D or Ctrl+L), I can just type in “map SFO” and it’ll do all of that. If I want to search Wikipedia, I can type “w open source”, if I want to search IMDB, I can type “imdb Tom Cruise” — you get the idea. This Lifehacker site explains how to do it and has a link to pre-made Keyword Searches, but this has allowed me to get rid of the extra search bar in the upper-right and …
6. Customizing Google Toolbar – move my google toolbar search bar to that location and hide all the other google toolbar assets. Using the customize toolbar functionality, I’ve also moved the PageRank feature next to the toolbar — thus, I have access to the two main things that I used from the toolbar – the search bar and pagerank.

Anyone else have any firefox advice?

Little Fighter 2

This is the most addictive game ever. Cute little bitmaps. With ninja powers. Duking it out — up to 8-character deathmatch. Chinese characters abound. FREEWARE. It doesn’t get much better (or worse, depending on your perspective — ie if you shouldn’t be wasting time) than this.

LITTLE FIGHTER 2

Sherlock Holmes

I love Ask Yahoo. The concept is simple — you submit questions to Yahoo who then uses the Yahoo search engine to dig up web pages which can answer the question. They’ve been answering questions like “Is Sherlock Holmes based on a real person?” or “How did ‘yellow’ come to refer to being a coward?” Its the best type of marketing in my mind (answering popular question, simultaneously de-mystifying and re-mystifying the technology, demonstrating a product’s usefulness, etc) and it even has its own RSS feed (which I’ve gladly subscribed to). My understanding is a number of other companies have also started providing this service (including “adult help” whatever that means… yeah, don’t think too hard about it), but thus far I just really like the stuff Ask Yahoo has put out in the past.

To answer the Sherlock Holmes question:

Sherlock Holmes was one smart crumpet. No matter how difficult the case, even the most devious criminals were inevitably caught — usually thanks to a detail noticed only by the great detective. Though we doubt any real person could ever possess Holmes’ incredible powers of deduction, his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did in fact base him on a real person.

The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explains. When Doyle was studying to be a doctor, Dr. John Bell was one of his professors. Holmes was particularly impressed with Bell’s talent for observation. In hopes of learning more about his patients and perhaps treating them more effectively, Bell would study their hands, look for tattoos, and listen for accents.

However, the similarities don’t end there. Like Holmes, Bell reportedly had an angular face and “shrewd eyes.” Additionally, both were Renaissance men, though their choice in hobbies differed. Bell enjoyed bird watching, sports, and poetry, while Holmes was never without his treasured violin.

But what of Sherlock’s unique name? Elementary, my dear Moriarty. This biography of Doyle suggests it was likely a simple hybrid of jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and violinist Alfred Sherlock.