dennis yang dot com

I heart pie charts.

Yes, I am a super nerd.

[Found at king ryan]

So, yah, I have a secret love for particle physics. There, I said it.

In the 11th grade, I attended a super nerdy particle physics summer camp at Northwestern.. Yah, while most kids were out frolicking their summers away, I was learning about all sorts of uber-nerdy stuff like quarks, muons, something-ons, and a whole bunch of stuff that really was completely useless from the standpoint of a high school kid. And, we got to go and visit Fermilab which is this super huge particle accelerator. That said, it was pretty much the peak of my particle physics education.

So, that’s why when I found this rap about particle physics this morning on BoingBoing, I was super amused. And the flow is actually not bad..

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

Uh yah.. nerdy. Like super duper nerdy.

Word.

I’ve been watching “When We Left Earth” on the Discovery channel, and been having nostalgic thoughts to my youth when I really wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I think at this point, the only way I’m getting up into space is if I follow Dennis Tito’s lead as a space tourist… Not a bad goal, I guess..

Anyway, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending back some fantastic pictures of our own planet..

Inspiring.

So, last night we were watching a recorded program (So You Think You Can Dance FTW!) on my Tivo when suddenly, an emergency broadcast message comes on… I go to fast forward through it, but the Tivo gives me the “BONG” noise..

WTF? Why can’t I fast forward through this emergency broadcast message… I mean, this isn’t even timely anymore, since this was recorded like an hour before…

Or.. wait.. Could it be? The Tivo is actually playing a *realtime* emergency broadcast message whilst I’m watching a time-shifted program?

And indeed, it was… apparently, even if you’re watching a recorded program, when there’s an emergency broadcast message, Tivo will interrupt your watching… It automatically pauses the program that you’re watching and shows you the emergency broadcast message.

Pretty cool.. The only thing that I’d suggest to Tivo would be to somehow let us know that it was indeed doing so..

Maybe something like an announcement a la “We interrupt this recorded program… this is not a test….”

Ever wonder how “people find the time” to create things like Wikipedia? Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk a few weeks ago about the so-called “cognitive surplus” that is finally being tapped into with the many changes in interactive media that we’re seeing in recent years…

Definitely worth 10 minutes of your time to watch.. and then, go blog or twitter about it or something. Here’s the Techdirt angle on the subject…

I’d add “cut watermelon” to the magic quadrant though.. cuz that’s my fav.

Following last week’s post about milkshakes, here’s this week’s musical geekdom (click to enlarge):

The person that made this map also did some amusing additional analysis that you should definitely check out…

I like twitter. That said, I don’t have it sending updates to my phone, just to IM, so when I’m away from my computer (which, admittedly, isn’t THAT often), I don’t get twitter updates (which is fine for the most part). I used to dodgeball, but now that I twitter, I find that dodgeballing doesn’t really make that much sense anymore.. (although according to Willo, she and her friends still are hardcore dodgeballers)

Even Mike, who was originally a skeptic, is now a convert.

I thought that this video kind of explains the twitter allure.

My fav derivative twitter application? Tweetscan. With it, you can get kind of a neat view of the tweetworld — right now, I’d say that sxsw is a good term to be watching… (I’m looking forward to a whole week of empty bars and parking spaces in the mission, ftw!)

So yah. You can Twitter if you want. I like it.

Also of note from this year’s TED.. Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) gave a really interesting talk about the “Lucifer Effect,” or, how good people turn evil.. Zimbardo, studied what happened at Abu Ghraib, and explained what factors could lead seemingly good people down a path of evil…

From the boingboing post:

What can be done about this? Zimbardo offers heroism as the “antidote to evil.” Teach kids to be ready to act heroically when the see evil. We need to give them real role models. Comic book superheroes are bad models, because they have super powers. A hero is the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib abuses. People wanted to kill him. They threatened to kill his wife and mother, too. He had to go in hiding. Teach kids hero courses, teach them hero skills, make them heroes-in-waiting.