Author: Ezra S F


  • As a freshman in college, I made… some poor choices involving computers. (As all such stories go there was a girl involved, but I was not interested in her. My friends were. There were plenty of other girls I was interested in tangentially involved though.) As a result of the poor choices, we were brought…

  • Chrome Task Manager

    A feature I love about Chrome is the Task Manager. Similar to Window’s Task Manager, the Chrome version shows the private memory, CPU use, and Network use for each window, tab, and extension. This morning on my Linux laptop it was fine. After lunch, Chrome became unresponsive to the point it asked whether I wanted…

  • Language is our genes talking; getting things that it wants. … Social learning is visual theft.

  • Google Needs a -1

    Did a search for “behavioral economics phd” and looked at a site that put some for-profit Master’s at the top of the list. Going through its “Perfect School Match”, it does not have behavioral economics PhD listed. The closest is applied economics at all for-profits. Lame. Useless. Went back to the list and noticed the…

  • From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…

  • Watching The Brain. In talking about Tiger Woods’ putt, they guess that he really has consciously removed all anxiety by entering “The Zone”. (Must be old.) The physical manifestation of this is supposed to be his lack of blinking. Now that Tiger is not doing so well, does this mean he is blinking a lot…

  • Ender Wiggin’s sister, Valentine plays the role of fictional Demosthenes online in several of the books by Orson Scott Card. She would play the role of an extremist to whip up the gullible Americans, while her power hungry psychopath brother Peter played the role of Locke would be the moderate. In reading Ender in Exile, a speculative train…

  • Student workers made up most of the IT work force when I was working at a university. The labor was cheap (no health or retirement benefits, $7-15 an hour) compared to hiring staff. For the grunt work, in my case making web pages and moving files, it was convenient. Sure training them was a hassle,…

  • Reuters had an interesting article on Chinese students gaming the GRE by setting up networks to share questions. Basically those who take the test post the questions online. Blogs and SEO ensures those seeking the questions can find them. Because ETS takes forever to ensure each question properly measures what it should, the questions are…