Erik’s Blog

Recently I’ve been enjoying the genre of popular psychology books. I realized that what I most enjoyed about my college psychology courses were reading about the experiments and studies, especially the ones with seemingly counter-intuitive irrational results. So far in this genre I’ve consumed Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, Outliers and Stumbling on Happiness, which no one took my hint to buy me. One of them, funnily, doesn’t fit that neatly into the genre.

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I bought my first Kindle book. I bought it on my computer, and when I started up the Kindle app on the iPad, it magically appeared. While the UI of the Kindle app is not as nice as iBooks, it’s not at all bad. I hear the Barnes & Noble one is horrible. From what I can tell, because the Kindle books are created principally for use with their monochrome device, none of the images aside from the book covers have any color. For most books, this isn’t really a drawback, but it could be for some. There are two major pros to the Kindle app that has me convinced that I will not exclusively be reading iBooks:
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Recently there was a soccer match that I wanted to watch, but that was not broadcast on my basic cable television. Investigating around the internet for a site that would stream the live game, I stumbled upon a very well designed website called watchlivefootball.tv. If you go there, you will see a nice listing of today’s fixtures with the time the match starts, the players, past results for each team, and the logos for each team as well as the league or tournament the game belongs to. It looks very professional. On each match page, there is a video player. When you click play, you are presented with this:
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At the moment I’m reading this fascinating book called Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (amazon). It’s a fantastic read and I could easily write a few posts about each chapter, but I want to focus specifically on one theory, discussed in Chapter 6, about violence and honor…and goats.
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Several weeks ago, I was contacted by a representative of Proporta.com, a manufacturer of cases and accessories for mobile phones, asking if I would be willing to review three of their products on my blog. I’m always up for new internet experiences, so I agreed. I scanned their website to find the most expensive products that might benefit me. I found nothing over £30. I ended up choosing an Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G, a Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case, and a Handy Travel Bundle. I chose the travel bundle because the week before I had lost my airline audio jack and I also needed a new wallet.
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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbolthis past weekend. While it was a heck of a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride, the overall message and theme of the book was very disturbing to me. It seems like, after pissing off The Church with The Da Vinci Code,Brown has decided to do a 180° and fire in the other direction, at Science.

Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol,read no further, but I promise you can read this post and still enjoy the exciting twists of the book.

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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbolthis past weekend. It was quite the page turner. What follows are a few comments on Dan Brown’s writing style.
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I’ve spent the past few days playing around with Clojure. Clojure is an implementation of Lisp, the most powerful programming language, that compiles to byte code that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. I won’t go into just how awesome that is, but there are many technical reasons why this platform decision is equivalent to standing on the shoulders of giants.

Clojure comes with a built-in library for parsing XML files into Clojure data structures, but, for the life of me, I could absolutely not find any implementations that went the other way, to render XML from the Clojure structure that the default parser creates. So I wrote one…in 25 lines of code.
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Back in April, my friend sgazzetti sent me an invite to particpate in a new social networking site I’d never heard of, called Aardvark [vark.com]. I’ve been using it for several months now, and I must say that I’m very impressed and fascinated. Aardvark is a question-answering engine that uses its users to answer the questions of other users. It functions on several principles…
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One year ago today, I got an iPhone 3G. It is, without a doubt, the most advanced gadget I’ve ever seen. Millions of words have been written on the internet about the iPhone, so I won’t say much else. But there is one benefit that I have yet to see mentioned:

The iPhone has helped RSS news feeds invade the last room of the house where newspapers still had a stronghold.