some words to not

the way information flows... i overheard a conversation on the subway escalator about this youtube clip: stevie wonder sings 'superstition' on sesame street. funky.

and you gotta love the little girl (or is it a boy - hard to know, it's the 70s) rocking out.

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walked by the new gehry building in chelsea today. not a big fan of glass curtains, and when you look at it up close, the dithered gradient print also feels pretty cheap. but the curves are pretty compelling.

walking around the 18th street side of the building, i noticed a huge crack in one of the panels.

too bad i only had my cellphone camera with me today.

also lying around were a bunch of custom-cut and probably very expensive granite blocks.

in other chelsea news, william anastasi was drawing an 8-hour blindfolded session with lucio pozzi at white box gallery.

update: at the risk of an infinitely circular link chain, cool post about the glass panels in the gehry building (as well as about the belgian waffle at burning man, which turns out to be some sort of architecture jam session).

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sorry, but this just totally cracked me up today:

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as part of my hobby of reversing the blade on these annoying telemarketers who call me every once in a while, i've made up a new technique that seems to stop them on their track for a couple of seconds, while seeking for the right next step on their flowchart.

when they ask me how much i'm paying currently for [insert service here], i give them a ridiculously low price. today i stated that i pay $9.99/mo for 105 channels of cable tv. even my new friend had to admit that his offer is not that good.

previous techniques included being completely silent after the first few exchanges of greetings, and sharing my recent loss of a close family member with the telemarketer.

but nobody does it as well as mr. mormon.

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a box i found on the sidewalk today was just too, hmm, precious to not perserve. large/small.

note the ghostly smilers on the left panel.

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this cartoon made me laugh today:

although it would have been funnier without the last frame, if you ask me. and you ask me.

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trying to learn about statistical analysis of experimental results, i came across this bit attributed to the san francisco chronicle:

and in a college textbook called 'statistics for psychology' i came across this (to me) funny passage:

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you gotta ask yourself how detached from popular culture the executives of cottonelle were when they decided to come up with their newest line labeled with Aloe and E.

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i once used to have a notebook where i wrote down awkward moments in life that i could draw from were i ever to write a script, because there's nothing a script needs more than awkward moments.

this morning i had a classic: seeing my downstairs neighbor walking home in high-heel boots and a nice skirt, i greeted her on my way out.

she complained that she's tired because she's been walking 2 miles in these uncomforatble boots. noticing that it was sunday morning, i asked her if she coming home from a long date.

to which she replied: no i'm actually coming back from church.

i also learned today that you're not allowed to serve a person more than one beer at a time in massachusetts.

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for some reason, only my cohort found this incredibly funny. most people on the airplane looked, how shall we say it? less psyched about the situation.

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what i have is a blurry image of a lobby dining hall. and how the outside seemed dark and white and freezing. i also remember some wooden stairs leading up the side of the guest house.

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this joke made me laugh out loud while sitting alone in my office :

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things are getting stranger around here, and i promise, i'm not making this up. but on tuesday morning i found this voice mail message on my cellphone (radio safe version).

the woman on the other line is seriously disturbed by her cleaning robot 'looking at her funny', and 'conspiring against her'. also she has apparently been abducted by aliens which caused her to get evicted. all that while she has to tend to 6 or 7 children (she can't remember how many), which is damn hard 'while you're up there in the spaceship'.

not everything is intelligable, but this is what i managed to transcribe so far.

from what i understand, she was trying to contact iRobot, the m.i.t spinoff that brought you the 'roomba' vaccum cleaning robot, and is also busy designing robots for the u.s army.

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this ice cream store wasn't any particular one that existed in reality. it was somewhat of a cross between 'baccio' in tel aviv and 'j.p.lick' in somerville, with maybe a touch of 'toscanini's' (cambridge). but really it was more like a 'mahane yehuda' market store in jerusalem, with big unmarked vats of ice cream standing outside the shop and the store owner reaching over to serve you your portion.

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this is what i found outside my door this morning, courtesy of my roommate.

no, the bike is not my birthday present. i was talking about the sign.

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the winner is: project fukurow

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for an unrelated media lab experiment, i was ranked on the big five. i've never heard of those before, but then that's true for a lot of things.

here's how i ranked on a scale of 0-100 compared to 250 business school students on the following five dimensions:

• Extraversion The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive: 31.
• Agreeableness This dimension includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate: 31.
• Conscientiousness People high in Conscientiousness tend to be organized, thorough, and planful: 14.
• Neuroticism Neuroticism is characterized by traits like tense, moody, and anxious: 68.
• Openness to New Experiences This dimension includes having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful: 82.

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someone has wasted my day by pointing me to the urban dictionary. you, too, should head over there and finally be enlightened as to the true evolution of the phrase fo shizzle mah nizzle, as well as how to prepare a pabstini.

curiously enough, someone added a definition for guy hofmann about a year ago.

while i wholeheartedly agree with this description, one has to wonder why the dude spelled my name wrong.

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got an email from an industrial design company, and their contact email was made@company-name.com. never saw that trick before.

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was away to nyc this weekend (and next!), and yeah, i also saw the gates. even got a fabric sample!

so was this all over the web already, or did someone not see the somerville gates yet?

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via the raw feed, a very cool interactive data visualization of baby names across the decades.

as you can see, my name is on the steady decline. although maybe, as cynthia mentioned, it just means that i'm getting more special.

you can also type in only the first few letters and see how all the names that start with something compare.

so far i found that: 'summer' and 'spring' both started in the 60s, but while summer is still on the rise, spring died in the 80s. also, as expected both john and mary, erstwhile nr.1 hits, are steadily losing ground. and it's sort of interesting to search for names starting with 'ess'.

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how to build a linux system for your grandma. pretty damn hilarious.

er, that is if you find linux jokes funny.

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just click.

via dagg and mike's list.

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steven pinker, in his mildly annoying 'the blank slate', cites an 'old joke among psychologists':

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trying to post my comment on the previous blog post discussion, my bloodhound-y spam filter wouldn't let me. i had to look at the log to find out why: i used the work 'socialist' in the post, which includes the illegal string 'cialis'.

to quote yariv: 'can you imagine how much of the current socialist agenda is blocked all around the world?'

seriously!

no wonder socialism died when the internet started. imagine there was a you-know-what (don't want to attract any more spam) drug called 'pitalis'. that would be the end of the free market...

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cute video that made me laugh. and remember - you heard it here first.

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there's nothing merchandise-proof in the u.s - not the police, not the subway, certainly not wars. hell not even full-blown national disasters.

but this is even further out there - people are showing their pride in losing the elections. blue state pride merchandising is advertised all over the pinko web.

what's next? 'i got syphilis' baseball caps?

unrelated: a blog entry here is #1 hit for 'MIT geeks'. strange.

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i have this east-german nostalgia branded messenger bag. however, most people around here think that it stands for dance dance revolution, and not deutsche demokratische republik.

maybe it's the m.i.t crowd that's biased. but shouldn't the communist logo give it away? that's a far cry from the anime style of that other ddr.

today i found evidence from the internet that my interpretation is the more reasonable one, logo aside.

if you have a short name like me, you can also find out what your name stands for. hopefully something more exciting than "Air Guyane, French Guiana (ICAO code)".

from cambridge, massachusetts, this is w-swn procrastinating while supposedly studying for an exam.

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walking by the store (if i were an american i would say 'walking by the cvs', but that's a topic for another entry), i really wanted a granola bar, but was late, so i didn't get one.

at the entry to the subway, a friendly dude offered me a free granola bar, which i gladly accepted. with it came a little note:

for my readers who come from countries where churches don't put out ads, this granola bar was an ad for a church.

but to me it was much more. it was a sign from god answering my prayers.

now i just wish that god would find such direct ways of telling me he loves me regarding some other thoughts i had. an ipod comes to mind.

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this morning. -5 degrees centigrade.

happy sankt nikolaus day, everyone. it even snowed today in boston for the occasion.

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if you want to add a little drama to the last 10 seconds, minute, or 90 seconds of something important (like a deadline or the end of a relationship), you should totally use these cool bbc news countdowns.

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is this me? or this, where "i" am listed with my piano teacher of 15 years ago?

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a dear friend forwarded me one of those new age cutesy stories with a moral over email.

i'll spare you the details, most of which you can recover from the following quote

which was then followed by the below signature

lovely.

but seriously, i think that the combination of the two parts of this email draw a surprisingly accurate picture of the state of email communication today.

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i remember that playing with calculators as kids, we also liked the fact that the sqrt of 17 started out with 1,2,3,4 and had 5,6 closely followed. and if you sqrt again, you still have 2,3,4,5 in close proximity.

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waiting for my laundry to dry, i'm snorting craigslist ads. read this one if you will.

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saw an amusingly named company employing a huge crane outside m.i.t today, called 'death wish piano movers'.

the word of the day is 'things are working out'.

knock on wood.

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beats me how she does it, but my roommate is getting everything for free. after an s.u.v (no kidding) it was a violin, and then an antique banjo. the latest addition to the collection is a 12'' powerbook and a digital camera.

how does she get people to give her stuff?

then, when i think of it, she sometimes misunderstands some of my offers and interprets them as me wanting to give her something for free. maybe that's how you do it.

it's a little like the difference between getting laid and not - maybe it's just being in the frame of mind that you are going to get the girl, so when an opportunity offers itself you just naturally take it.

coz it's not like the other person came to the table with a complete agenda, and maybe they just think you know what you're doing and they should go along with it.

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the palestinian leader. balding as early as 1964.

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the halloween shopwindow dressing has hardly given way to the thanksgiving spending extravaganza, with some bold christmas decorations rare and far between - and yet first snow fell today in boston. i caught it on my bike from m.i.t home, right on the border of cambridge and somerville, and although it wasn't much of a snow, anyone still hoping for a short-sleeved day this season should adjust his expectations.

well i wasn't really on my way home, but to a bar.

but i have my drinking under control.

really.

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read this brilliant story on cnn, before it's archived.

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in an unrelated story, a kind spirit bought me something called a floor rag, imported - no less - from israel. for my american readers, it's a piece of cloth that is aimed to collect the dirt from the floor with the intention of actually cleaning the room, instead of just wetting it, moving the dirt around and obscuring it with fragrance.

floor cleaning is not a big favorite here, and floor rags are a piece of household equipment almost impossible to obtain in the u.s of a.

you know, i've always wondered why shower-happy americans love to make fun of the french for just using perfume instead of washing the scum off, when that's exactly what they do with all their other clearning chores: wet, disinfect and distribute.

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ever noticed how the american phrase 'quote-unquote' (the closest americans can get to sarcasm, as in "this hotel is quote-unquote fancy"), is really in reverse polish notation?

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based on something i did about a year ago, i was invited to participate in a debate last night, arguing the merits of my previous hometowns of new york and tel aviv over the dullness of boston.

apparently i have a web presence for not liking boston.

first of all i would like to thank the boston globe for having me over, i would like to thank you, bob, for your excellent questions, and the audience here at boston university for not even knowing about this event.

i am very confident looking ahead, as post-debate polls were in swiftly and indicated a clear 23:12 win. these figures are mainly based on the comments of the security guard, who wishes to remain unnamed, but allowed me to quote him as 'i think she's waiting for you down that corridor.'

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being annoyed as i am today - at myself, here's ways for you to empathize with me and annoy other people.

like "Every time someone asks you to do something, ask them if they want fries with that. "

which reminds me of john trinkaus's research, who is "meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him".

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this just in from 'the register': killer hamster ices owner

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got a mysterious voicemail message in my office today:

how did journalism even exist before the web, is what i'd like to know.

yes, i did call her back, and no, i won't tell you what this is about yet.

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what's going on on my desktop:

• a video stream of a lecture in AI that i missed
• the soundtrack from 'garden state' playing at 50% volume in the background
• my email, to which i'm replying when i get a new message
• IM, active
• the problem set for last week's AI class
• the problem set's solution
• my blog file, in which i'm writing now

zoz points out that i have n.a.d.d

let me know if this is an interesting article, because i haven't read it all.

had to return to tend to all the things going on on my desktop.

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yes, i did apparently move to the jungle. this is what i saw last night on my way home

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this is what stood in my way on the sidewalk of my street today:

am i living in the jungle now?

btw for those of you who - like me - have never seen a raccoon before, it's about the size of a medium dog (smaller than a lab, but fatter), and it looks at you in this strange way, standing calmly on the sidewalk, noticing that you're a foreigner and enjoying the fact that you have no clue if this is a dangerously biting animal or a cute cuddly pet.

it then moves slowly aside, never taking its gaze off your eyes.

we both moved very cautiously.

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it's not news to me that it takes time to get used to my sense of humor. what i didn't know was how quickly you can unlearn it.

paula just came back from a summer in california, admittedly a notoriously humorless place (see: hollywood comedies). within the single hour of our first conversation, i had to clarify no less than twice that i was kidding.

maybe it's also because she was dating hotties this summer, another notoriously humorless sector.

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saw an ad near mit. it was basically just a big banner saying

weird, but they got the audience right.

is seems to be an ad campaign leading to jobs at the google lab.

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funny t-shirt i saw today

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but if my life was a michel gondry movie, all that would happen would be a dry thorn and some dust blowing across the dining table unnoticed by us but not the viewer, and maybe a beetle that's indigenous to lebanon would cross the unbroken yolk of saeed's egg.

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in passing i heard that the olymics started today.

between you and me, i couldn't care less.

but this is pretty damn cool.

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today, two years ago, i mounted that fateful alitalia flight from tel aviv to new york city.

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it's almost unnoticable, that hint of a stranger touching your house and trying to put everything back in place.

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from a radio show about robots and beer (yes, the bbc), via jodi:

a robot that opens beer bottles.

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i'll come back to write a little more about this newest discovery of mine, but i'll be damned if okcupid isn't going to be the hottest thing on the web soon.

any service that writes this gets my respect:

in short, everything you ever wanted to do with your friends!

brilliant.

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it doesn't happen too often, but it's still brilliant: cycling on fresh tar. or skating on it for that matter.

the combination of the smooth ride and that smell that reminds me of my childhood is hard to beat.

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had a dream about marbles tonight, and when i woke up i thought that marbles must be the worst business to be in.

they gotta be cheap, since kids buy them; they seem to be not trivial to manufacture (i - for one - have no clue how to even start making marbles); they last forever, so there's not much resale value like printer cartridges; and they are very heavy to ship.

mental note - stay away from the marble business.

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reading this amusing ap story, i noticed some ad links that were just too cute.

"want to serve your family something new?" just above "surf singles near you safely"? i mean, seriously, that would be something new for your family, wouldn't it? something new to discuss over dinner after you've been kicked out.

and to clarify, if things get a little too hairy, there's an ad link right below it: "need a lawyer? get tips on finding one".

we live in a crazy world. and i'm not just saying this because i saw a robot cut open someone's skull today. foh realz.

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nine days after it was announced, the the countup is complete. thanks for participating. the 10,000 log entry belongs to a reader from israel, who reached my site searching for this blog specifically.

naturally, apple beat me to it.

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was gonna write this whole rant about money, and buying a suitcase, and consuming, and how almost everything i own predates my arrival to the states or was bought in a thrift store.

but i don't feel up to it. too much other shit to do.

i'll just say this: it's true what they say. you always live up to your spending limit. no matter how much more you earn, you just up your lifestyle and spend more (up to a limit of course), and then you're always in for more money, wanting things you didn't even stop to think about when you had so much less, dreaming of the next better life style, keep the ratrace going.

i should have totally gotten a thrift-shop suitcase.

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in perfect sync with apple's countup to 100 million songs, i'm counting up to my 10,000th blog hit since march 2004. this count started at around 9270 entries.

the winner here, too, will receive a gift certificate for 100 free viewings of future blog entries.

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just in time for the fourth of july, this is the american dream:

get the world's longest email address.

gotta love their tagline:

via the raw feed

and btw, what's the deal with everyone showing browser windows stacked like playing cards. is this the new web design trend now?

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this seems to be a day of closures.

over 1.5 months after it was lost, i found by bike again. still locked to the media lab bikestand, as if nothing happened.

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with the european championship in full bloom, a conversation with andrea reminded me why i love football over any other sport:

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for those of you having followed the layne story, some people have been digging hard.

obsessive

it was funny to find one commenter linking to my online column (in hebrew).

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god forbid we should know better than the golden boy of software how to debug their application. they probably have all their spiders and scripts scurrying around gmail collecting usage patterns and determining in a robot-like way how to make gmail better. no lowly human input necessary.

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"look buddy. you can pay $10 to have your package delivered. but if you want it really delivered, that will cost you another $7. just so that, you know, nothing bad will happen to it on the way."

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on a flyer that had a typo saying

someone added in blue pen:

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alright, this is simply too good to pass up on: text based pong!

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didn't have a book with me today, so i noticed this:

right underneath the escalator (the one closer to college ave), there's a faint carving in the redbrick floor, which looks like a poem. my train arrived before i was able to decypher it all.

not even sure whether it's guerilla or sponsored.

update: apparently there's another poem burnt into the bricks at davis sq, too. that's not the one i saw, though.

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an american friend visiting our common israeli friends, who have a little girl, found it hilarious that the child had a toy garlic press. i failed to see the humor.

only later i realized that she thought that a garlic press was a very yuppie utensil, as if the kid had a purple plastic champagne cooler.

to me, coming from the middle east, a garlic press seems almost as basic a household item as a knife, making it a natural fit for a child's play kitchen.

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i'm aware that i'm probably biased by my mood, but this morning i just feel like i don't belong. to alleviate the pressure, i went to the common room and tuned into the israeli tv station. what a state of affairs it must be when i turn to israeli culture for some normality...

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walking back to lab from class i saw a really beautiful exhibit. one of the benches around m.i.t east campus was converted and had about 20 PhD theses embedded in it. they were standard-bound engineering theses, but their covers and part of the pages were cut to expose exactly one sentence from their acknowledgements section. so there were all these bound books with windows cut out into them reading: "to my loving parents, who supported me throughout this fascinating journey" and the sorts.

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that's right, it didn't get stolen, i just misplaced it. that's very like me. my thoughts are always wandering off. so i must have taken the bike somewhere and then come back some other way, and for the love of god i can't remember where that place was. it's been a few days now looking in all the regular places i go to, so i sort of got used to the idea.

actually the timing is not too bad, since graduation sales are bound to put a lot of new and cheap bikes on the market this month. still, it was a nice phillips 1963.

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why bonfires kick the hell out of bar-b-q's:

because at a bonfire people are usually around the fire and at a bbq they just sort of stand beside it. being in a circle you look many people into the eyes, and some faces are really intensified by the fire's light. at bbqs you just talk to and look at the few people around you.

at bonfires everyone's really in the experience, at a bbq everyone just seems to be waiting for something.

bonfires are more dangerous, bbqs are contained.

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the coffee machine in the lobby promises "coffee house taste", the cheese in my fridge boasts "deli style" and the tortilla chips in my cupboard are proud to be "restaurant style". as if mass-production vouches for fine taste.

in the little mediterranean country where i'm from, it's usually the opposite. you're supposed to feel ashamed that you're even buying packaged food. when you do, the label will reassure you that it's all "home style" and that it "tastes like self-made". no brand would want to be "restaurant style". hell, most restaurants try to call themselves "home style".

i guess in the u.s. there's more faith in the commercial.

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you learn something new every day. first i was re-educated as to the risks for hiv involved in different sex acts, and today i learned that a vegetarian diet is sufficient for all health purposes.

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from a description of a sandwich option at the student center's "alpine bagel cafe":

katmandu?!

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another weird austrian moment: today, at rush hour in the central viennese subway station, with hundreds of people coming up and down the escalators, there was not a single person talking. all you could hear was the sound of the escalators' motors and a thousand footsteps echoing in the huge hall.

plus! europe list slightly updated. also added an additional disclaimer to the list.

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jim cantalupo, near-anonymous head of one of the most influential organizations in the world, has passed away "suddenly and unexpectedly of an apparent heart attack" yesterday morning.

this is a good opportunity to remind everyone of the award-winning documentary super size me, opening in theaters may 7. honestly, the trailer is not very promising (as in 'could have told the story in 15 minutes'), but i'm willing to be surprised.

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invite i got today. this is why i love mit:

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some of you might have gotten word of the petition to remove jew watch from the google search engine. wanting to check it out (like millions of others), i googled 'jew', and what really struck me as cool was the self-referential first google news item regarging the word 'jew':

(click on the image to enlarge)

here's google's take on the issue, which i quite frankly support.

btw, i finally checked whether the etymology of the word 'jewelry' is related to 'jew', and apparently it's not.

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google too busy? try the mirror.

btw, playing with that site i found out that my blog made it nr.1 on google for guy+hoffman. and some people said i could never top baseball stats.

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it's bloody april. how can it be snowing? it's only light snow, but still...

btw, did you see my heavy snow with porn music clip? it's from back in them days when the snow was super heavy and my dv camera was not yet broken. sniff. donations are welcome.

more snow

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one of the coolest things about mit is its hack tradition. mit hacks are defined as

even though there were a few hacks during my time at mit, including a pretty major one, i rarely catch them live. but this morning as i was walking to class, i think i did spot one, so i'm pretty excited:

the big traffic routing sign at the harvard bridge construction site, which is just outside of the mit main entrance was hacked to flash "harvard sucks", instead of the usual "seek alternate routes", or whatever these signs usually read.

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greg pak, director of "robot stories", has linked to my blog on his blog. in his entry he writes beautifully about how i thoughtfully wrote about how people writing blogs promote his movie.

i just couldn't resist the infinite mirror effect.

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