For all of you social-media-inept people, Foursquare lets you check in to places you are using your smartphone. All you need is a phone with GPS and opposable thumbs and you can check in. People’s first response to this thought is “I don’t like the idea of people knowing everything I’m doing.” This is completely ridiculous. It’s not as if your check-ins are instantly sent to everyone on the Sexual Deviants or FBI Top Ten Most Wanted lists; it only goes to your friends! Who you approve! Also, you don’t have to check in everywhere. You want some alone time at the movies or perhaps somewhere more…let’s say…adult, you don’t have to tell all your friends about it. Come on people, discretion.

Finally, the coolest part of all, when you start checking in to enough different venues, you start to get cool badges such as the one displayed above, the Super Mayor Badge. What do these badges get you, besides a ton of money and girls? Nothing really, it’s just fun. Not everything is about money and girls, although this is currently the only thing I can think of that is not about those.

So give it a try, sign up for an account, its free, try it out for a month. I bet a lot of you will be hooked. I know it probably sounds like I work for Foursquare or get some sort of kick-back off of this sign up but its not true. I just feel the need to convince other people to do what I do, even though I hate copycats. I realize this makes no sense.

In the old days, speed dials were ranked by your favorite people, or perhaps those who called most. Good luck ranking your top 100 friends though. I don’t even have 100 friends so I don’t really have to worry about it. With my system, you use the initials of the person you want to call/text to reach them quickly. With 100 slots, that basically gives you all of the 2-digit combinations of speed dial, so we will use those to set the initials!

Say you have a friend named Billy Kramer, his initials (BK) would correspond to 25 on the cell phone keypad so he goes in speed dial slot 25. Now with your phone, rather than typing in Billy Kramer you just hit 25 and call and there you go. If you have a touch screen that is not the iPhone like I do, you know the pain involved in scrolling down the contacts list. With the Voyager, you can even use this to text people. If I want to text Billy, I just type 25 on the dial pad then Options -> New Text Message. Much faster than going to the Menu, then Messaging, then New Message, then typing in the name.

Obviously this system won’t be perfect. If you have a sister named Betty Jones, her initials would also have to occupy the #25 position so you’ll have to get a little creative.

I’ve even gone back to the old school method with this system a little bit. Say Billy is one of your good friends, maybe even your best friend. Why not just set him to speed dial #2 (2 = B). That would be more convenient for you and might even free up that #25 position for your sister Betty.

Try it out, you’ll be amazed at how much faster it really is.

So for this I have only two questions:

1. Why, during a presidential campaign, are the candidates’ pages not locked for editing? Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

2. Does Hillary Clinton have nothing better to do than edit Obama’s Wikipedia page until she gets banned? I mean come on, be a good sport Hillary.

While most people that investigate this search around on college ranking websites, I decided I would pay a visit to the world’s smartest man. That’s right, none other than Albert Einstein himself. Maybe in my next blog I will discuss how I created the time machine to go back and visit him but you need not worry about that. I walked into his office, took a look at the board, and didn’t even need to say anything else. Here is what I found:

Now how can you argue with that?

Ever heard of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?? What’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? The book claims that it is 42, but really, Douglas Adams was off. Of course the obvious answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 314. Perhaps during his calculations, Adams discovered that 3*14=42, and that is how he got to his answer.

But to claim that 314 is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is in itself too simple. There is so much more to the number than that. Stephen Hawking has produced several hypotheses about the number, but no one can seem to understand what he is talking about. A young reporter from Cambridge University once interviewed Hawking and asked “Mr. Hawking, is it true that only 3 people in the world understand the number 314?” Hawking paused a moment and replied “I am trying to think of who the 3rd one is.” He was of course referring to me as the second person.

So in conclusion, the number is simply too complicated for the average person to understand. Therefore, rather than ramble on about it, I leave you with something you can understand. These are some pictures that my brother Bobby created that attempt to capture the complexity of 314.

The idea came from a homework assignment (maybe homeworks not so bad after all) in Professor Millstein’s CS 131 course at UCLA. Just the thought of that course made me change my mind, homework is still bad after all. But basically, the assignment was written in ML (SML more specifically) and it works by creating nested mathematical functions that calculate a number from 0 to 255 for each a red, green, and blue value. These functions take in an x and y value and output a color. By varying the depth of the functions, you can create some pretty cool images from this. Most of the images on the site are of depth 7 or 8 but I have attached the source code here. If you understand ML and are ambitious enough to give this program a try, you basically just include hw3.sml and then call the function getPic with the first parameter being the depth and the second parameter being a SML random generator. It might require a little debugging as I am too lazy to open up the program again.

The images are on the site for your viewing pleasure. There is also a rating system, because not all images were created equal. If you would like, rate a few of them so that the popular ones show up first!