Angelina Jolie's beautiful new tattoo underlines the importance of place to us. We all find meaning in where things happened.
Maybe that's the mentality behind the recent buzz around location-based applciations. Many geoboards have come and gone but recently, another wave seems to have taken off in light of new interest.
Last night, szym.net and I were thinking about great places to live. Cambridge is wonderful, but sometimes, you have to go and fly around a bit. We didn't actually reach any conclusion but we did ask ourselves a few questions.
Should we live on the top of a ski slope? Yes.
Formula for buying land on a hill assuming there's no need for a thickness to your ring:
Q = All the money you have
p = Price of square footage
a = Area of your house (not including the backyard)
r = Radius of circular plot of land you can fake to have = (Q-P*a)/(2*\pi)
Total effective area you get to be king of:
A = (\pi*r^2)
Let's look at the numbers:
If you have Q = $100 and the price of square footage was p = $10, you would typically only afford 10 sqft of land at the top of the hill. Let's say your house takes up a = 5 sqft. Plug the numbers in and instead, you could pretend have a circular plot of land with radius r = (100-10*5)/(2*\pi) = 7.96 ft. That means, now, instead, you can have A = (3.14*7.96*7.96) = 200 sqft. to enjoy!
10 sqft => 200 sqft
Last Wednesday, I had a delightful time with Professor Scott Nicholson http://www.boardgameinfo.com/content/43-the-game-professor (a lot of thanks to @slifty for organizing the event in the first place). We went through a bunch of games quickly without dwelling too much on fully forming a strategy for any one of them but rather focusing on learning each one of them. I wanted to share a couple of them here since some of them can be played with a modified deck of cards. Although, I do have to say that it takes out a lot of the fun without the beautiful artwork and pieces that some of the games have. As Scott says, "a good game depends on the people and the environment in which it's played".
Well, here's an interesting post that I came across today. It's written under pseudonym and I'm a little struck by how many people are turned off by the assertion. The knee-jerk reaction to the article is likely zomg this girl is so shallow or "holy crap, I better get a prenup in searching for a partner". I'm not going to debate that but I'm glad that the touchy subject was raised and it should certainly be a bit alarming for both men and women looking for a family partner.
I can say for sure that I respect this woman's life decision and would even go so far as to say that it is indeed a very feminist viewpoint as she claims. It's extremely respectable for anyone to see a clear role in life. This woman will likely lead a responsible and solid family (if she finds what she is looking for). Is it really so bad to crystallize the tit-for-tat? I often imagine that a feminist role can almost work in any direction. A woman could just as easily take responsibility for carrying the riches but the dude better be damn well committed to taking care of the family. This woman is precocious for writing this article and anticipating the fair amount of criticism. Is it possible to find an equally staunch male who will write that he wants to take care of family and marry up? If so, then I hope he is not met with as much criticism because there are plenty of women looking for just that. If not, then we should all reconsider who the shallow ones really are.
In trying to understand what the chit-chat behind SOPA is all about, I realized that I haven't made a blog post in a long while. You can find out everything you need to know about the proposal on wikipedia but I'll try to summarize here before moving on to the thing that I actually wanted to share.
SOPA stands for "Stop Online Piracy Act". On the surface, it makes a lot of sense. If you're a content producer, you need to protect the stuff that you generate. That means others can't do things like copy images without proper permission. There are a few obvious problems. The whole act is hard to enforce and it could open up a hole where a large player like Vevo could use legislation to get at a small blog. That's kind of like giving Chanel more ammo to sue the little handbag copycats out there. It would be non-trivial, but possible to engineer a workaround by anybody who cares enough and wants to. For example, something like Napster where content is distributed on a "second internet" could be engineered to circumvent the system. There's also a lot of other potential systems that could get around the legislation. For example, one could encrypt data. One could try to deploy a distributed domain naming service. One could get very creative and employ some of the very neat systems research techniques that have been discussed in academia. I'm not saying that one shouldn't voice their opinion in support of or against the legislation. The act may or may not be relevant and the privacy push itself in some shape or form is inevitable. I'm just saying that depending on who you are, you could consider more carefully where efforts are best spent. That's really all I have to say about the subject and it's enough of a hohum to preface the pictures I came across. I was at the Cambridge Public Library on Friday just browsing the local stacks and I came across a biography on Patty Boyd. Is it just me or does this shot of her look exactly like that old Brittney Spears album cover? Looks like someone else made a similar association but it feels more than just the outfit match ...A wonderful surprise to have Dan Butterworth (http://www.butterworthproductions.com/Meet_The_Puppeteer.html) share his craft with us during tea.
