David Chillag R.I.P.
I didn’t really know him except through his video lectures and a few live ones I sat through but he truly was a phenomenon. In the Technion there is a running joke that David Chillag is the king and Eliza Malek is the queen of the Mathematics department. It’s a joke that is filled with truth. And I think the sadder part is that future generations will know what they lost. Because every possible Math course in the Technion’s video library is lectured by David Chillag. And I suspect that won’t change unless the material will have a serious overhaul, which won’t happen any time soon. It’s not easy, especially these days, to find a teacher with such an impact that it colours your studies through and through. But Chillag is one of those people whose kindness, attention, social flow and plain old educational skill couldn’t help but leave a mark on so many students. I really do suspect thousands or maybe even tens of thousands mourn his loss even though maybe a quarter of them actually met him in person. He was like Sagan or Feynman. Even though they are long dead, their teachings and strong drive for education still accompany us today. I’m sure Chillag’s spirit will be with us for a while longer. And in the afterlife halls where you stay until you’re forgotten he’s sitting next to those two right now. Maybe calculating the odds on which of them goes first.
Posted in Less Interesting News, No Category, School by Eran with comments disabled.
Post-Exam Update (Garlic Butter)
The last exam is finally over. I hope I did well enough because I know it wasn’t great. I ended up not going to reserve service. Hooray for me! Eight more days of actual life. Now I just need to work on my final project for this semester and all will be well. Got three weeks to go, gonna get a read on it this weekend and start in earnest next week. Hopefully, we can be done rather quickly. And just to make it a bit more interesting, here is something Maayan and me started doing because it’s so easy and tasty… Garlic Butter Requirements: 1 Large Israeli Garlic Bulb 150 grams of butter (Roughly, adjust according to taste) Salt One Oven Tin Foil Total Time: Roughly 15 minutes of actual work. About an hour of waiting. Total cost: About 8 Shekels (One garlic bulb costs next to nothing) Proceedings: Take one garlic bulb and wrap it completely in tin foil Warm your oven to 180 degrees with the top section and circulation Shove the garlic in there and wait an hour. This might be a good time to let the butter out to melt. Take out the garlic, unwrap it and empty all the cloves into a bowl. Add the butter and mix vigorously. Add one half teaspoon of salt (also adjust according to taste) and mix again. Don’t over use. :) We like this one because it might be unhealthy (82% fat in the butter) but we love butter Continue Reading →
Posted in Mixing, No Category by Eran with comments disabled.
It’s Finals Time
There should have been an update yesterday but I was too busy with other things to get to it. It’s finals time right now and my last first test is on Tuesday. And I might be headed for reserve service after that. Still uncertain about that. And in addition, there is a job on the horizon that is looking good. Nothing completely solid yet but I have hopes. So, we will see after next week.
Posted in No Category by Eran with comments disabled.
University Sues Student for Graduating Early
This has been sitting in my to read queue for a few days now and I want to say something about it but I don’t know what. It just seems totally weird. So, when you don’t have anything to write, write about not having anything to write. Here’s the deal: A student enrolled in a private business and economics university in Germany. By an act of sheer genius (both for planning and execution) he managed to finish 11 semesters worth of studies in just 3, completing 60 exams in 20 months. If I met the guy, I would probably shake his hand vigorously and then maybe carry him on my shoulder and parade him around the town. The university had other plans; they are demanding 3000 euros as missing fees for his studies. That is, they want him to pay up for the rest of the year even though he only needed half of it. So… The university says the fees are for all the studies, which means they are probably charging all in advance. If not, why say that? If so, why are they only asking now and why only for the remainder of the year? The payment shouldn’t be for studies, the payment should be for access to university property (material, instruments, etc…) and the privilege of taking the tests and passing them, getting a degree. He should only pay for the time he used. The Technion charges per semester, which seems fair to me. But what if Continue Reading →
Posted in Geekdom, Less Interesting News, Weird by Eran with 1 comment.
Review: Brave
It’s a new Pixar movie. Of course we had to go see it. Both of us love Pixar and this one looked especially cute and personally, I always love to see powerful, bad ass women taking on the world their own way. I guess it makes me feel there’s still hope. Before going, I saw two basic reviews of this movie that both said pretty much the same thing: This is a good movie and excellently made and performed but it’s kind of cliche. It’s like a standard Disney movie but we expected more from Pixar. So, go to watch, we did. Maayan’s opinion: It’s awesome. My opinion: I can see what they were talking about. I mean, it’s beautiful. The animation is superb in perfect Pixar quality. And you can especially see the attention to details given to the cloth and hair, Merida’s hair in particular. And the style and the jokes that you’re expecting from Pixar are all there. It’s charming and lovely and touching and cute. But up until about a third of the movie, I kept expecting to be something more, something hidden, some tug at the heartstrings of a touchy subject, anything that will remind me that the guys behind this are the guys who made The Incredibles or Toy Story 3 or Ratatouille. But no. So, like they said and I reiterate: It’s not the new Pixar sensation. It won’t blow you away with a magnificent story (the animation is great, though). But it is charming and cute and probably Continue Reading →
Posted in Reviews by Eran with 1 comment.
Today’s Lucky Ten Thousand
XKCD rolled out a comic not long ago about something that is very near to me. I know that there are some things that I know and other people don’t. Actually, most people don’t. I hear about it almost every day, practically every week. I know a lot, my T’s head is very wide (I’ll get to that momentarily) but I really try not to make fun of people or condescend the fact that I know stuff. I can also admit that there are things I don’t know or don’t get: Like finance or Computation Theory. But when there comes a time when I know something and other people don’t, I do my best to explain it. Because it’s fun. It’s fun to explain, it’s fun to see understanding and it’s especially fun because it enables more fun when there are more knowledgeable people. So what are we doing today… Heat Death – is one possible scenario for the end of the universe and, in fact, one of the more likely ones and one most touted (claimed to be, spread around, shouted from the roof tops) in science in general. The theory basically states that the universe is expanding and, as there are not other apparent affectors, will continue to expand until all the energy present in the universe will be smooth and spread so thin that everything will achieve a consistent temperature close to absolute zero and thus all thermodynamic activity will cease and not more changes can occur. As the saying goes, Continue Reading →
Posted in Memes and Stuff by Eran with comments disabled.
And here is my entire “Company Loyalty” point in a nutshell
Google fucked up too, I’m not saying they didn’t. But somehow, their fuck ups seem diminutive compared to other fuck ups. When they introduced Buzz, they had privacy issues which they solved by putting a “Turn off Buzz” button. When they rolled out Events, people were flooded but there worst case was an annoyed Robert Scoble who had to delete events from his calendar one by one. Their worst fuck up I can think of right now is collecting wifi traffic data and not being transparent about it but even that was mostly a moral issue of privacy. Here, in one of Facebook’s fuck ups, they practically erased user data! If I had anything on Facebook besides my name and birthday, I would be seriously pissed right now and on my way out the door. If you’re not, may I please know why? (And I’m sorry, the “Everyone is on Facebook” argument just isn’t good enough anymore).
Posted in IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Graphene as a Water Sieve
Graphene is basically a carbon lattice one atom layer thick. It’s been around for only a few years and the guys who made it got a Nobel prize for it. And we’re figuring out how great that material is about once a month. This time, they’re telling us we can use it to desalinate water, to purify it, a thousand times faster than current methods. The explanation goes something like this: because of one interesting property of graphene, we can make a sheet of it with holes at any size we want, like the size of a water molecule. It goes like this, this is a water molecule. This is a salt molecule. (It’s not an actual molecule but stay with me for this) Salt, when it’s in your salt shaker, looks more like this. But when it dissolves in water, it looks like this. The salt compound is made from more massive atoms than water. And with the graphene sheet, we can make holes that let water through and keep salt out. Which basically means that you can pour salt water through a simple filter and get pure water on the other side. Yes, this ideal is still a ways off, there is still work to be done, but this idea is just super cool! Science is awesome! :)
Posted in High-Tech, Less Interesting News by Eran with 7 comments.
Review: The Bartimaeus Trilogy
I didn’t know these books existed before my serious relationship with Maayan. And when I first came over and saw her room, I noted them among her many books. A while later, when I was told of the great meaning of the shelf on which they stood, I filed them away on my list of books to read sometime in the future, maybe. Still later, at one point, she raved about how good they were, how well they were written and about how awesome Bartimaeus’ character is. So I bumped them up my list to the point of to read when I have time. And then she outwardly told me to read them. So what could I do? Say no? One more preface: this is a series of books Maayan keeps in both the original British version (seen to the left) as well as in the Hebrew translation. That’s saying something. The only other books who fit that category are the Neil Gaiman books. So Bear that in Mind. In short, The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye and Ptolemy’s Gate follow Nathaniel, a bright and aspiring young magician in a world that is a sort of urban fantasy where the urban is represented by an early 20th, late 19th century tech level and the fantasy is represented by an elite class of magicians, people with the talent and the know-how to summon spirits to do their bidding. This leads to a Britain ruled by magicians who treat the common-folk like slaves Continue Reading →
Posted in Reviews by Eran with 2 comments.
פיראטיות תלת ממדית
In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, pretty much every household had their own molecular assembler which they could use to make just about anything, paying only for the raw material the device required. The precursors of that, the 3D printers, are already becoming something that a single person could buy for their home. They are still quite complex, small and expensive but the day in which you could just get one from the store the same way you get a microwave or a toaster oven is not far away. Seeing this coming, the people behind The Pirate Bay have offered a new category which they call Physibles. That is, 3D design files to be fed into a 3D printer to print… well, anything you can design. I just looked at it now and people are offering anything from Mark Zuckerberg’s head through a nerf gun and up to a Warhammer 40K Space Marine. I think this is insanely cool and I hope two things: One, that I would be able to print my own… anything in the near future. And two, that Old Manufacturing (paraphrasing Old Media) companies won’t go bananas with copyright and try to stop the revolution but instead try to follow it and work with it.
Posted in Geekdom, High-Tech, IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 1 comment.