Author: cosmo

Yesterday I hung the oversize prints that Thom made for me. There are four photos by me and two by Rob.

After three years in an office with blank walls, it’s nice to finally have some kind of decoration. They look awesome.

A new course at Berkeley: StarCraft Theory and Strategy. This is the actual course description:

I’ve never played StarCraft (I’m a big fan of Warzone 2100) but this is pretty cool. Or scary. I’m not sure which.

Oh, and bonus points that you need calculus and differential equations to “fully understand” the course.

I’m writing a proposal (whee!) and I meant to type the word “telecommuting” but instead ended up with “telecommuning”.

It made me laugh… I suppose telecommuning would involve some sort of long-distance spiritual link with someone, and perhaps some ohhhhmmmmm chanting.

Yay, jury duty!

The amazing un-fall-like weather continues; today the thermometer topped 70 degrees. It was sunny with a few wispy clouds, so after taking the opportunity to wash my car, I hopped on my bike and tooled around town a bit.

I had my camera with me and captured a few cool things along the way.

Global warming is probably a bad thing, but I can’t say I’m complaining too much when it’s almost 70 degrees on November 5th. Wow.

I’m listening to some tunes and one of the classics by 2nu came on. It made me think of Nardo Polo, the legendary guy mentioned in several of the songs by that band.

On a whim I checked out Urban Dictionary to see if he was that legendary. Indeed, he is.

It reminds me of one of the ultimate teams I put together for a tournament back in the mid-1990’s. My friend Mike “Cheese” Monterastelli and I were co-captains of the team, and both of us loved 2nu, so I suggested that we name our team The Greatest Marble Players Who Ever Lived. Awesome. It sure confused the other teams, though…

Ahh, orange juice… the sweet, sweet nectar of the gods.

As I do every day, I’m enjoying a snack which includes a nice tall glass of orange juice. I’ve been drinking this stuff daily for as long as I can remember– probably 30 years or more. I chug about two quarts of it a day, and apparently a single 8-ounce glass will give you 100% of the recommended dose of vitamin C for the day. Doing the math, I’m getting about eight times the C I need. Good stuff.

Yep, autumn is finally here. Despite beautiful 70-degree sunny days, the trees have decided it’s time to bunk down for the winter. The tree in our backyard has turned a brilliant red and yellow and looks awesome.

Alex just asked me what letter is most common in the English language. I told him it was “e” (everyone knows that, right?) and following that is either “s” or “t”.

But I’m a curious kind of guy, and since I was sitting on the bed using my laptop anyway, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to set up a series of shell commands that would do this for me. I knew how to access the spell-checking dictionary, and from there it was just a matter of chaining together the right pipes to take all of the words from the dictionary, break them down, and count the letters.

Here’s the command:

aspell -d en dump master | tr A-Z a-z | sed s/./”&\n”/g | grep [a-z] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

And the results:

It’s not surprising that “e” was on top, with “s” right behind, but I could’ve sworn “t” was more popular than that. Upon further thought, I suspect the data is a bit skewed because this is the dictionary and words like “the” only appear once. In spoken or written English, it appears much more often than words like, say, “phlegm”.

So to be more realistic, I should use a book instead of the dictionary. Of course I have a copy of Moby Dick handy… I use it for all of the testing I do in web sites. One change to the command above gives me the count from the novel instead:

cat moby-dick.txt | tr A-Z a-z | sed s/./”&\n”/g | grep [a-z] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

The answer? Things are a bit different:

Once again “e” trumps the rest, but now it’s “t” in second place and “s” has dropped down a bit. How odd. Even more interesting is the fact that “q” isn’t dead last– it’s 22nd. My theory on that: there’s a character in Moby Dick named Queequeg, and the mere mention of his name probably bumps the letter up the list.

This is hardly scientific, but all in all it’s a decent test. And yes, I’m a complete geek for taking three minutes to figure out how to do this.