I spent two years in graduate school working toward a Masters in Computer Science, with a focus in theory, while also serving as a teaching assistant for EECS 376, Foundations of Computer Science. I often joke to friends that the material taught in class had little practical value, which has…

There are only a finite number of songs. Of course, you could argue that audio comes in a continuous range, and songs can go on for indefinite length. But the gist of a song can be captured in ten minutes. And there are small discretizations of pitch, timbre, frequency, such…

Jo recently found and shared with me this online word game called Wordle (which actually has a really cool backstory). The rules are simple, and the website explains them well: To make it more clear, here’s an example where I was able to guess the wordle in 4 tries:

More than ever, I’ve been mentally preoccupied with the threat of political polarization to American society. The last four years, I’ve seen exactly how much harm a president can do to standards of civility and discourse. I hope we can collectively choose to live in a world that’s less divided…

I spent this past Saturday, Sep 21, at the Github office in San Francisco, attending the “Day of Civic Hacking” hosted by Code For America. We started the day by listening to lightning talks from the following speakers, describing different aspects of housing in SF: Donna Hilliard, Code Tenderloin Jay…

I awoke from a dream about basketball, of all things. I was back home and playing a pickup game with childhood friends who had somehow both grown to match my current age while also not changing at all. My grin stretched as I hit difficult shot after shot. Off the…

It’s been over a year since I read Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, but last week I finally found the perfect metaphor for it. There’s a bar down the street from my climbing gym called Magnolia Brewing Co. My brother is usually hungry after we climb together, so we’ll sometimes stop…

If you haven’t heard, Google is shutting down G+. Some are taking this to mean that they have forfeited the social media space to Facebook and Instagram. But most people don’t know that Google already has a killer social media app. In fact, I’ve been using it as my main…

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is binge-reading about sports on the internet. I rarely watch games themselves, but love how they become the source material for millions of fans to generate their own hilarious content. Of the various sports discussion boards across the internet, the NBA subreddit is my…