Nerdy

What the World Needs Now, Is Sarcastext, Sweet Sarcastext

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Oh the difficulties of using sarcasm online! How are you supposed to get across the fact that you are being sarcastic when you can’t alter the tone of your voice, give a little wink-wink, or nudge-nudge? Anyone with a sense of humor that instant messages has surely encountered this problem first hand.

This week I was fooled once again. CNN published an opinion article on why Stephen Colbert’s bid for presidency must be stopped. Here is a sample that quotes Colbert and explains why he would be horrible running our country.

America’s role in world: “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Under a Colbert administration, it appears America would just attack other countries for no valid reason.

The whole time I knew that Colbert’s candidacy and stances are simply a joke, but I thought the person writing the opinion article was taking it seriously. Apparently I was wrong. Upon closer inspection, that little blurb at the beginning introducing the author can be quite important. Usually it just toots the person’s horn and gives you links to their other material, but this time it actually contained something of real value. “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian”. And in case that isn’t evidence enough, if you take a look at the Story Highlights in the sidebar, you will see “he channels Colbert, satirically calls his candidacy a threat to our way of life ”

So the author was being sarcastic and I had no idea. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone. This is an obvious problem. And when there is a problem, we need a solution. Enter sarcastext.

Sarcastext is a idea for a specific font to be used whenever you are being sarcastic. The font itself alerts the user to the sarcasm, just as bold, italics, and capitalization are used for emphasis. Thus, whenever the reader encounters sarcastext font, the joke will not go over their head, which we have seen can have embarrassing consequences.
 

 
This idea goes back to my early days of AOL IMing and I can’t credit myself as the one that came up with it. Neither can I remember who did. So junior high friends, if you are reading, take credit in the comments …

The article even makes some Hitler references, as previously mentioned in my post on Godwin’s law.

Photo: ManyLittleBlessings

Baseball Litmus Test – Do You Find This Interesting?

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Baseball is the most polarizing sport – you either love it or can’t understand how people could ever like it. Sports like basketball and football, you still have the die-hard fans, but it doesn’t seem to have the opposition calling it boring and refusing to watch that baseball has.

It’s been said that to be a baseball fan, you have to appreciate history, numbers, and statistics. It’s not so much that any given pitch is exciting, rather it is what happens over the course of an entire at bat, game, season, and many decades.

ESPN finished their year in review, in which they look at everything unbelievable that happened in major league baseball in the past year. I think this is a good litmus test to determine whether or not you have the potential to like baseball. If you are fascinated by any of these blurbs, you are in danger of becoming a baseball fan:

  • In an Aug. 30 game against the Padres, Andre Ethier did something that ought to be impossible: He got the Dodgers’ first AND second hits in the same inning. How’d that happen? It wasn’t easy. In between Ethier’s hits, those other Dodgers helped make this nugget possible by going walk, strikeout, walk, walk, sacrifice fly, walk, walk, walk.
  • Eugenio Velez went 0-for-37 this year, the most hitless at-bats in a season by any non-pitcher Zero Hero in the history of baseball.
  • The Mets went 299 games without hitting any grand slams – and then hit two slams in a span of six hitters.
  • In an Aug. 14 game against the Cubs, Braves rookie Arodys Vizcaino marched out of the bullpen, faced three hitters, struck out all three and still, somehow, succeeded in A) blowing a save and B) pitching only 2/3 of an inning. Those strike-three wild pitches make all sorts of strange-but-true feats possible, don’t they?

And the postseason was even a little crazier:

  • The Cardinals have played 19,387 regular-season games in their history. Not once had they won a game in which they trailed five times. But that’s the mess they overcame to win Game 6 — when all that was riding on it was losing the World Series. That’s all. The Cardinals trailed in this game by scores of 1-0, 3-2, 4-3, 7-4 and 9-7 — and won. Unreal.
  • Never had both teams homered in extra innings at any point during an entire Series. Then, naturally, each team homered in extra innings just in GAME 6 (Josh Hamilton in the 10th, David Freese in the 11th).
  • In back-to-back-to-back at-bats in Games 6 and 7, David Freese hit a game-tying triple, game-winning homer and game-tying double. How incredible was that? Only one other time in World Series history had a player gotten game-tying or go-ahead hits in three consecutive trips to the plate. And naturally, it was Allen Craig, earlier in this same World Series.
  • In Game 1s of this postseason, the Yankees, Tigers, Rangers, Phillies, Cardinals, Brewers and Diamondbacks started pitchers who had been around long enough to make a combined 1,469 regular-season starts in the big leagues, plus another 30 postseason starts. But the Rays had other plans (as always). They started Matt Moore in Game 1. How many big league games had he started in his life before that game? That would be one. So, naturally, Moore went out and threw seven shutout innings (giving up two hits), the first time any rookie starter had done that in a postseason game. So it took 107 years for it to happen once. It then took four days, of course, for it to happen a second time — thanks to Arizona’s Josh Collmenter.
  • Finally, there was Albert Pujols’ picturesque little box-score line in that very same Game 3: 6 AB, 4 R, 5 H, 6 RBIs, with three majestic homers and 14 total bases tossed in there just for fun. Feel free to stare at that line for as long as Albert stared at his long home runs, because in the entire live-ball era — all nine decades of it — there has been only one regular-season 6-4-5-6 three-homer game, by Dave Winfield against the Twins on April 13, 1991.

Head over to ESPN.com for the full articles on the regular and post-season 2011.

Photo: Shutter Daddy

Big Game and Ninja Turtles

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Coming off an emotionally rough Stanford loss last week to Oregon, pissing away the chance at a PAC-12 and national championship, Stanford football fans are shell-shocked like a ninja turtle. But if there is one thing we know about ninja turtles, it is that they are resilient – they came from the gutter, became a force to be reckoned under the tutelage of Master Splinter, and bounce back after eating a little pizza. Do you see the parallels here to the Stanford football team, rising from an embarrassment to a national powerhouse under Master Harbaugh?

I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at the Stanford and Cal football teams in recent years considering the 114th Big Game is this weekend. Even though Cal has taken home the Axe 7 of the last 9 meetings, this hardly tells the story. The Cal and Stanford programs have flip flopped in recent years – Stanford going from horrible to great, Cal going from great to mediocre.

Here is an interactive chart you can use to examine the last 6 seasons for the Stanford and Cal football teams. You can play around with it, but these settings are my favorite to show the trend: y-axis = Point Differential, x-axis = Win Percentage, Colors = Unique, Size = Wins, check all the boxes, and hit play (sadly Google doesn’t allow me to set the default values and it wasn’t worth the effort to explore other charting packages).

I’m no statistician, but it looks like Cal is trending nowhere and Stanford has the up and to the right trajectory that follows the group of overachievers everywhere in life. Tough break Cal, at least you’ll always have The Play to cheer you up. Go Card!

Brogramming 101: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

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Oh brogramming! What a beautify made up word. It is a combination of two words I hold near and dear to my heart. BRO + PROGRAMMING = BROGRAMMING. Yes, the meaning matches your current mental picture – a sickass dude programming a computer.

What does this involve? It is up to interpretation, but it definitely involves wearing your sunglasses indoors while using the computer. Lifting weights is important – and don’t forget your protein shakes. Drinking alcohol while programming is encouraged. The more caffeine consumed the better.

You may be absolutely puzzled right now. How the heck did these two worlds collide? Well, in the land of software, the Silicon Valley, pretty much the coolest thing you can do is code. And to show how sweet you are, instead of pictures on your desk of your loved ones, people here decorate their desks by displaying the largest and most intense energy drinks you can find. Yes, it is a unique place.

Starter Kit

Now that I have you excited, how do you join the team? Copy this desk setup:

You must be concerned about health – at least to an extent. Eat healthy food and be sure to pair it with a workout regiment that focuses on the beach muscles. Bicep curls, bench press, calf raises, repeat. Next, (this may seem in direct conflict with the previous point, but just go with it) drinking a ton is cool. Beer, vodka, or Jager. You can drink while at your computer, or alternatively you can return to coding after a wild night in the club. Be sure to have powerful energy drinks within arm reach to stave off the inevitable crash when it arrives.

Congrats, you have passed Brogramming 101 are now a brogrammer! This answer on Quora provides some addition reading material for those of you that want to advance to 201 next semester. Let me give a sneak peak for the Pedantic Post readers that don’t click on links…

Here is a flow chart to study before next semester (programming logic is similar to the logic of flow charts so they are useful for communicating how a program should behave):

If you are ready to start writing code, here is a pretty solid example. Do the same for the song Lip Gloss or any Little Wayne jam and email it to me for extra credit:

 

Why should you care?

Nerdy and cool are colliding whether you like it or not. Need evidence? Chess-boxing is the fastest growing sport in America (I always thought it was hilarious how many sports claimed to the fastest growing in America, so what’s one more claim?):

This collision is great news for everyone. If you are a nerd, you get the opportunity to battle the jocks that made fun of you in high school. If you are a hella chill dude, you get the opportunity to compete with people way smarter than you on a slightly more even playing field. What a great opportunity!

Faithful readers, what bro-sports and dude-tivities can we invent? The top idea gets to challenge me for slammers and/or pink slips.
 

 
Everyone is trying to hire programming talent these days. But the smart start-ups are trying to hire brogramming talent.

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Pedantic Posts Was Hacked!!!

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Yes, it is true – after a series of posts alerting the world to the methods of hackers and how to protect yourself, I was hacked. Here is what happened.

On Thursday I received an email from GoDaddy, my hosting provider for this site, alerting me that I had two hours to remove several phishing attempt pages that I had up. If I didn’t remove them within two hours they would shut down my site. Needless to say, this was news to me!

For those of you that don’t know, a phishing is when a fake site tries to steal a user’s login information or credit card number. Most of the time this is done by sending you an email with a link. Let’s take Bank of America for example. If a hacker were able to obtain the login and password for a Bank of America account, they could steal money by transferring it to another bank account. So the hacker would send you an email that looked like it was from Bank of America, telling you to check your account urgently. But the link in the email wouldn’t go to the Bank of America website, it would go to a nearly identical web page the hacker created to collect your login info (a phishing page).

Why the hell were there phishing pages up on Pedantic Posts? I can assure you I did not place them there, which means I was hacked and someone else did it. You see, a hacker doesn’t want to use his own domain name to host these pages. The site would quickly get reported and shut down. Instead they hack a site and put the page up there.

Realistically, the phishers don’t go out and hack a site. They probably pay a tiny amount of money for the username and password to a site that someone else hacked. Either way, they gained access to my site and put up a number of pages including several phishing attempts and porn advertisements.

It turns out that I had a pretty weak password setup for my site. 8 characters, only 1 capital, 1 number, no special characters. You better believe I have fixed this. Lesson learned. What was the damage? The site was down for 2 days due to my slow response time, but it could have been much worse!

New Look to Pedantic Posts

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Some of the more astute readers have noticed the new look to Pedantic Posts over the last week. I am pleased to announce that the redesign is complete – welcome to the new and improved Pedantic Posts!

Previously I wasn’t happy with the way Pedantic Posts looked – in the past I took a couple WordPress themes and only made slight tweaks to them. But most free WordPress themes aren’t that impressive or way too busy looking. I’m still using the Bueno theme, but have made so many changes you might not even recognize it anymore.

The most obvious change is the amazing new logo. My sister Lara used her art skills to put together a great logo that features my trademark long hair and glasses. She is also spreading the good word of Pedantic Posts by displaying it on her online portfolio. You should hire her for your next logo!

As Matthew pointed out yesterday, the site looks bad on the iPhone. It’s because of the very limited number of fonts that are supported. I’ll be looking into fixing it eventually…

I should also point out that I have short hair now, and soon will no longer have glasses. I’m getting LASIK! Don’t worry, we’ll keep the logo as is.

Photo: Nattu

My Latest Project – The Save Our Balls Pocket Shield

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I don’t think everyone is aware of the huge problem facing mankind. No, not global warming. This one isn’t talked about for some reason, but soon it could be an even bigger problem than global warming. I’m talking about infertility, specifically male infertility.

Children of Men is an excellent movie about the world in 2027, 18 years after the last human was born. That’s right, the human race became sterile – the scary thing is that this scenario is not as ridiculous as you would think. In the movie it is due to a genetic defect in women, but in real life it is more likely to be men that are the downfall.

Sperm counts are dropping like middle school girls running hurdles. It’s bad. In the last 50 years it is estimated that sperm counts have halved. Even worse, they show no signs of stopping – every year sperm counts around the world are dropping 1 to 2 percent. Do I need sources for this? No. I don’t care what the exact numbers are – there is so obviously a correlation, it doesn’t matter if it is only half as bad as I just said. The fact remains, we are doing some real damage.

So what is happening? Unfortunately there isn’t one answer, there are numerous environmental factors that contribute to this decline. Things like plastics, pesticides, soy products, obesity, sitting in an office all day, and more. Pretty much everything in our lives …

There is one that has come up in the last 15 years that should be more publicized – leaving a cell phone on in your pocket! Even a limited exposure of an hour a day has been shown to immensely kill sperm and lower testosterone. Luckily, this is an easy problem to fix. Enter the Save Our Balls Pocket Shield. This is a simple product I am producing that will protect your cojones – simply clip the shield to your pocket before putting on your pants and it will block the radiation from hitting your boys. Perfect!
Keep reading…

The Ratios That Matter Most

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Nerds like numbers. But what really matters is how one number relates to another – the ratio. Here are a few that I pay attention to in various aspects of my life.

Scrabble

The points scored to the time of making the play ratio – also known as points per minute.

Facebook

The poke to friend ratio – can you get over 50% of your friends to poke you?

Dogs

The leg length to weight ratio – the shortest legs on the fattest dog is ideal.

What ratios do you enjoy?

 

Images: Bethan and Lance Nishihira

Assorted Internet Awesomeness

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I’ve been sitting on a few bookmarks without posting them because they are just too short to make into a whole post. Of course the logical thing is to put them together to make one awesome blog post.

The first is for the fellas. I have always felt that one of life’s little joys is urinating on ice (TMI?). Snow makes a good substitute as well. Well here is something that lasts a lot longer and is potentially cooler:

The next is for the grammar nerds. You know how when you quote a passage with a typo or grammar error you use [sic] to designate that it wasn’t your mistake but the person’s you are quoting? Well what happens if the person you are quoting put [sic] when there wasn’t really an error? Check out this post with the possibilities. This reminds me of my obsession of using parenthesis within parenthesis (not that I do it that often (but I would if it were more socially acceptable)).

Here is one for the computer nerds – what is the most common phone number? What does the internet think is the most common phone number? Not the same thing! The number 2147483647 is the largest 32-bit signed integer, so if a website stores the number that way and someone enters a number larger than that, their phone number will be stored as 214-748-3647. Which begs the question, who in Dallas actually has that number and how many phone calls do they get that aren’t for them? Keep reading…

Artificial Intelligence and the Significance of P vs. NP

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Artificial Intelligence is a fancy term for smart computers. Any program that can learn from past experience, behave similarly to a human, or strategize is often referred to as AI. A program that follows a set algorithm is not typically called Artificial Intelligence – it may seem the machine is intelligent by multiplying 3215 by 17.34 almost instantly, but that isn’t enough to earn the AI designation.

Believe it or not, there are a ton of problems that cannot be solved algorithmically. Possibly the most common example is a traveling salesman. A salesman wants to travel to 5 specific cities and return home using the minimum amount of gas. This is simple with a small number of cities, but what if he wants to go to 100 cities? How about a million?

When I say that it can’t be solved algorithmically, I mean that you can’t layout steps to getting to the right solution and know that it is the right solution without checking every other answer. Keep reading…