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Geek Defined

September 2, 2010 Education / Internet / Pictures / Technology / Videos
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If a geek is just a per­son who’s really into one spe­cific thing, I don’t think I can really call myself a geek. My inter­ests are pretty damn eclectic.

How­ever, no mat­ter the topic, I have an over­ar­ch­ing desire to under­stand how and why things are the way they are. I sup­pose that’s why I ended up with a degree in psy­chol­ogy with a sta­tis­tics empha­sis. If, as I have said before, psy­chol­ogy is the appli­ca­tion of sci­ence to philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing, then sta­tis­tics is the foun­da­tion of the empir­i­cal method of doing same. It is the analy­sis of obser­va­tions of glean mean­ing out of the seem­ingly ran­dom and/​or overly com­plex nature of the world.

And to those who would claim that math and sci­ence is soul­less, I would argue there is some­thing amaz­ing about an ele­gant proof to a com­pli­cated prob­lem. Like­wise, graphs, the visual form of sta­tis­tics, can make incred­i­bly com­plex data imme­di­ately under­stand­able and relate-​able.

Here are some of my recent favorites:


(from HIMYM, Marshall’s pie chart of his favorite bars and bar graph of his favorite pies.)


(from SFoodie, an actu­ally baked Venn dia­gram of pies.)


(from The Expend­ables, a movie poster with the pre­vi­ous kill counts of all the stars of the movie.)

For more fun graphs like these, check out Graph­Jam. For a more seri­ous dis­cus­sion of stats, try 538.

But that last pic­ture really got me. The orig­i­nal poster with just the action stars of my child­hood is already pretty damn bad-​ass, but adding their kill counts just gives it so much more depth. That’s why I can’t wait for aug­mented real­ity tech­nol­ogy to become viable. In the mean­time, I’ll just have to set­tle for Google Goggles.

OK, now to run before the vio­lence geeks find me.

Incom­ing search terms:

  • himym mar­shall

Never Had It This Easy

February 6, 2009 Friends / Internet / Pictures / Technology
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Yes­ter­day, T-​Mobile pushed a firmware update for G1 phones. RC33 doesn’t include Cup­cake, but it does fix some ran­dom stuff. The hang­ing on Mes­sag­ing was get­ting pretty annoy­ing. It would do it with any­one I had a long tex­ting his­tory with.

As a spe­cial bonus, it includes native sup­port for Google Lat­i­tude built into the Maps appli­ca­tion. If you haven’t heard, it’s basi­cally Google’s answer to Twit­ter. You can set updates to your friends with your loca­tion, a short mes­sage, or even a pic­ture (but it would be through MMS). You can man­u­ally post your loca­tion when­ever you wish, or you can have it auto­mat­i­cally track you through your phone’s GPS.

As you can imag­ine, there’s already a ton of arti­cles out about how dan­ger­ous Google Lat­i­tude could be.

Con­sider this arti­cle. Is the author’s wife right to be con­cerned that he has geo-​tagged pic­tures of their home (with valu­ables in the back­ground) and then revealed that he was leav­ing town with­out her for a busi­ness trip? Are you scared that some­one could find a time-​stamped and geo-​tagged photo of you in a pub­lic place and then fol­low your stream to find out where you lived?

I don’t have much in the way of valu­ables or good looks, nor do I think I’m par­tic­u­larly offen­sive to peo­ple around me, so I’m not wor­ried about being stalked, robbed, raped and/​or killed. (Not nec­es­sar­ily in that order.) But it could be a lot eas­ier nowa­days with all the location-​based tech­nol­ogy there is out there.

I remem­ber back in the good old days when find­ing peo­ple was a chal­lenge and I was 1337.

By the way, I geo-​tag my posts, so I’ve been track­able for a while. You’d have to catch me around the time I posted to be sure it was accu­rate, though. And I’ve enabled my phone to auto­mat­i­cally track me, so feel free to send me a stalk­ing invite if you’re so inclined.

Wiped Clean

December 30, 2008 Technology / Television / Videos
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Eddie C and I were talk­ing the other day about a clip from last week’s episode of <a onclick=“javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/’);” rel=“nofollow” href=“http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/” href=http://www.topgear.com/” rel=“_external”>Top Gear, where James May and Jay Leno review the Honda Clar­ity. It’s the world’s first pro­duc­tion (well, right now only a very lim­ited num­ber of them are avail­able to lease only in the LA area) hydro­gen fuel cell car, and Jay Leno says it is the “sav­ior” of the gas car while James May calls it “the most impor­tant car in the next 100 years.”

Leno makes a really good point about how some (gas) car enthu­si­asts are say­ing that fuel cell cars and elec­tric cars will be the death of the gas car, but that’s not true. He makes the com­par­i­son of when the mod­ern car was first intro­duced, it freed the horse from man­ual labor, and horses became a hobby for enthu­si­asts. Though there are less horses around and they are most expen­sive, they are gen­er­ally of bet­ter qual­ity and are bet­ter treated than horses of old. Peo­ple can just enjoy horses for recre­ation and aes­thet­ics now.

The same thing hap­pens with every out-​dated tech­nol­ogy. There are still peo­ple who enjoy vinyl records and 8-​tracks; not many are many are made any­more, so they increase in value as col­lectibles, and peo­ple still lis­ten to them. Despite IKEA’s suc­cess, there are peo­ple who still value antique fur­nish­ings. And in spite of our world of mass-​produced cloth­ing, knit­ting and cro­chet­ing are gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity again as hob­bies. No one still needs to knit their own cloth­ing, but peo­ple enjoy the activity.

And the same thing will hap­pen with gas cars. Both gas and gas cars will be more expen­sive in the future, but they will also have a niche mar­ket. And since not every­one will NEED a gas car, man­u­fac­tur­ers can stop mak­ing shitty Geo Met­ros and instead focus on beau­ti­ful per­for­mance cars. They will inno­vate unique cars instead of sim­ply re-​branding and can­ni­bal­iz­ing prod­uct lines.

Progress will save the car, not kill it.

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