PhD Comics creator speaking at Berkeley

I'll take a day off if I have to: Jorge Cham, the creator of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, is speaking at UC Berkeley on May 4. (For a while, he was also tentatively scheduled to speak at Stanford the next day, but that just disappeared from his web site.) It's the Dilbert of graduate school. If you've never been a grad student, it may not be that funny. But if you have, it is absolutely hilarious. Go on, procrastinate! You can't resist…

Visiting Mars and Cuba… in San Jose

Two Saturdays ago Brian, Will, and I went to the Tech Museum of Innovation to check it out. None of us had been there for years, so we wanted to see what it was like now. Well, sadly, we all found that it was mainly focused on kids and that we had outgrown it. So while it was good to go once, I don’t think I’ll be spending $10 for the museum again.

Now, the IMAX movie at the museum, Roving Mars, was excellent for the most part. The photos of Mars were amazing, especially when they’re 80 feet tall. But the transition between actual footage of the launch from the ground and computer graphics of the rover flying through space was seamless — so seamless that it made me start to question the other images I was seeing. Were the images of Mars artists’ renditions or real satellite photos? (I think they’re the latter.) Still, I’d recommend the movie to anyone interested in the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which have lasted much, much longer than anyone dreamed.

Afterwards, Tao joined us for Cuban food at the nearby Los Cubanos restaurant [photo]. Very tasty, and very filling — we completely stuffed ourselves and still had leftovers. By the way, when I did a web search on the restaurant, I found two addresses and two phone numbers. Ugh. The real address is 22 N. Almaden Ave (not Blvd, and not San Pedro St), and I don’t remember which phone number is right.

Dueling juggling videos

Once upon a time there lived a comedian named Chris Bliss. Chris liked to tell jokes, and he also liked to juggle. One day he juggled to the tune of a Beatles song, and audiences were thrilled. The act was taped and posted on the web, and soon e-mail started flying through cyberspace. "You gotta see this act, it's amazing!" they exclaimed.

But not all were amused. The juggler enthusiasts were incensed. "Juggling three balls like that is easy!" they cried. "And his movements, they are not graceful!" One of them was particularly sick of the praise that Chris's video got, so he made his own. It was set to the same music, but this time, Jason Garfield used five balls, not three.

True, Jason's act was more skillful technically and it was arguably more graceful. But Chris's "lack of grace" has a point — the juggling was set to rock music, so Chris's juggling mimics the jerky, abrupt movements of a rock musician. It's the whole package that's impressive, not just the juggling.

And so the moral of the story is… uh… just go watch the videos…

Good ideas going nowhere at work? Set up a market

The management of a technology company realized they didn't and couldn't know all the great ideas within the company. So they set up a marketplace, where ideas become stocks and employees can buy and sell shares in them. The more valuable the idea, the more valuable the stock.