I’m going to be in San Francisco this weekend to visit some ex-Austinites and to check out the town that everyone seems to love so much.  I’ve made not liking California into something of an art form over the past couple of years (e.g., I’ve trained the voice in my head to do an impression of Ahnold whenever I read ‘California’), but I’m making an effort to go into this trip with an open mind.  Just for this weekend, I’m going to forget about the astronomical prices, the soul-crushing traffic, and my debilitating fear of earthquakes and just try to enjoy the city in and of itself.

In other news, Doug is moving to Austin this weekend, and I came across a post he did on MySpace as a gaming platform that I thought was spot on and worth a read.

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Dave Winer is one of my pet peeves; his only redeeming quality is that he may be the most aptly named human being on the planet.  He’s whining about the use of the term ’social graph’ as opposed to ’social network’, and claims that the people who use the term ‘graph’ to describe our web of social connections are idiots.

There really is nothing more annoying than being called an idiot by one of your pet peeves, so forgive me if the rest of this blog post comes off as a bit harsh.

Here are a few things you might not want to do if your primary goal is to not sound like an idiot:

• Spell ‘theorems’ as ‘theorums’.
• Claim that all graphs are four colourable. The non-idiotic version of this statement is ‘all planar graphs are four colourable‘. (Don’t like my British spelling? Bite me. My graph theory textbook was written by a dude who spoke the King’s English.)
• Say that combinatorics is related to statistics. This statement is arguably more misleading than the ’social graph’ terminology Dave is railing against– combinatorics is related to the statistics of coin flips, but not to things like bell curves or regression or anything else that a normal person would associate with ’statistics’.

Looking over this list, I wonder if Dave’s idiocy wasn’t a strategic attempt to prove his point– if a nominal “math major” like Dave Winer doesn’t know anything about graph theory, how can we expect a mere mortal to understand it? This sort of thing drives me crazy– it plays off of math phobia to trick people into thinking this stuff is really hard and that they’re not capable of understanding it.

Bad form, Dave. You’re on my list. Well, you were on my list before. But now you’re like, even higher on the list.

Labels: math, social networks, rants

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• Sean deployed OpenID for the comments on his blog.  The best part about Sean working @Google is that we can now make ludicrous, unsupportable inferences about Google’s business strategy based on things he says and does, and all he can say is “I can’t talk about that.”  It’s like he’s one of those dudes at Buckingham Palace with the silly hats.
• 30 Rock fucking rocks.  That show cured my inoperable brain cancer before it was even diagnosed.  Yeah.  It’s that good.  (Let’s hope it lasts longer than the 2004 Emmy Award Winner for Best Comedy Series and Pinnacle of Western Civilization.)
• Madonna says she is an ambassador for Judaism.  Right, because the Jews don’t have enough problems.
• There are few real tests of friendship in life.  Most of the time it’s cool to just chill, kick back a few beers, and watch the game or a movie with people whose company you enjoy.  It’s not until we’re faced with a really rough patch that we know who our real friends are, and there’s nothing rougher than moving.  The topic has been on my mind lately, so here’s a list of people who I would help move, no questions asked, as long as they provided beer.  Of course, if they didn’t provide beer, they wouldn’t be the people I think they are.
  • Jordan
  • Jim
  • Clay
  • Jimmy Jo
  • Tina Fey
  • Kate
  • Mike
  • Other Mike
  • Sean (at least until his first anniversary at the Goog, at which point he’ll be more machine than man and will have no need for beer.)
  • KShep (at least until he gets married.)

  For everyone else, your best strategy is to get as much dirt on me as these people have.  Also, you should move away from Austin.  No way I was going to put someone on this list who I might actually have to help move.

• Duke plays Notre Dame on November 17th.  Right now, there is a decent possibility that Duke might have a better record than Notre Dame at that time, and might even be favored.  That makes me laugh hysterically.

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I was somewhat irate (read: pretty fucking pissed) when Steve Jobs announced the $200 price cut on the iPhone. Steve’s decision to offer $100 store credit to we poor, stupid early adopters has been thoroughly covered by every single technology blogger on the planet, but it was only when I read Cringely’s piece this morning that it crystallized for me: I am in an abusive relationship.

I wish I was joking. But when you look at their recent behavior, it sure seems like Ike Turner is not only consulting on the Iraq War, he’s also doing marketing at Apple.

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