Why nothing will replace Facebook (least not for a while)

Though I'm quite motivated in many aspects of my life:

• Olympic marathon trials qualifier in marathon (extreme amount of work)
• MS/PHD program while working full time

I'm still VERY lazy.  I do not think I am alone.  Especially when it comes to technology and using web-based applications.  I'm hardly motivated to find all of the features of gmail, Facebook and other such entities.  I usually just wait until I stumble across someone who wants to show me how well they have mastered these tools and pick up tips.

For example, gmail has a multi-sign-on feature that allows you to sign on as multiple users at once.  I have two gmail email addresses.  I do not use this feature.  I have safari and Mozilla on my laptop and keep one account signed in within each browser, effectively signing in both account via two windows.  Why do I do this?  Because I do not want to figure out how to use their service.  I started to read it, got tired after 5 seconds and decided my way in life was sufficient.

But I digress.  Slightly.

I do not think I am alone with my aversion to learn all of the features of a product I already use.  I'm tech-savy and I hate doing it if I'm not motivated at times.  I currently have 3 email addresses.  Part of this is due to work where I cannot check my personal email at work and checking my work email at home is a pain.  This I am forced to live 2 separate email lives.  It should stop there.  But I have a gmail account that I am slowly converting to for all email traffic.  But (and this is embarrassing.  So embarrassing that my professor tried to kick me out of class for admitting it today) I still have an AOL account.

WHY?

Because in order to move off of AOL completely I need to email EVERYONE I know and ensure they never send email to my AOL account.  I'd also have to move saved mail from AOL to gmail, move contacts, update automatic notifications I have that I actually use online (I could set up a forward but then I'd get all of the spam my AOL account also receives as well) and occasionally check my AOL for important emails from family that I need to get.   We all have family members that just don't get the 'I changed email addresses' bit, right?

So it's a pain.  And laborious.  And that is what it would take to migrate off of Facebook.  All of my friends are on Facebook.  All of my pictures are on Facebook.  Facebook is now also an email system of sorts and I (gasp!) save emails there in a effort to keep some important things vice write them down.  If I migrate to google+ I, and all of my friends, would have to re-friend everyone, copy all pictures I might want, establish the same lists via circles and re-create my virtual life.

But I'm lazy.  I'm not going to do it.  Maybe the rest of the Comp. Sci. students in the world might decide to do this, but they're not.  They're not as lazy as I am and they're not doing it.  Even if G+ is better.  Even if the UI is faster, more intuitive, integrates into the rest of the Google platform and blows Facebook out of the water.  There is something to be said about being 'first' in certain social computing aspects.  Facebook did overtake MySpace, but I believe MySpace did a poor job covering the different aspects of what social media needed to do.

MySpace didn't provide the API Facebook did and let's be honest, it was a little shady.  The default 'browsing' feature was to search for women between 18 and 35 that were single, viruses spread like the plague on Myspace and it was WAY too easy to assume the identity of another person (a group of my friends all decided to be Chuck one day on Myspace.  They all had the same profile pic, info, name, music and background.  Unless you knew the actual URL of the real Chuck, you never knew who you were talking to).

But Facebook incorporates any and every improvement Google+ makes to Facebook in a quick fashion, allowing users to have all features of both products.  So, until the lazy folks like myself die off from this planet or a social network that is tracked inside our conscious brains is invented I do not see the masses leaving Facebook anytime soon.

Sorry Google, I really liked Google+

:(



For an interesting visualization of the different lives I live via email please see this:  https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_11/index.php?title=Confessions_of_my_email

No Pi day today. Need to wait another 3 months, 14 days....

Professor Kruskal pointed out to my class a few years ago that someone had written a paper about how pi is wrong:  http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf

The author points out that if pi were 6.28, things might be simpler or more elegant...

For example, when you took trigonometry you learned that one full rotation of a circle is 2*pi.  Thus that cyclical graph we know as sin(x) and cos(x) would look the same but the x-axis would just be multiplied by a factor of two.  After all, humans invented pi and the value.  Maybe it's tacky to suggest that one circle should allow pi(in radians)=pie(shape).  Or maybe we gave it a number before we really understood what pi was really about.  Let's dig a little deeper and explore some other things Mr. Palais points out:

Currently:        cox(x+pi) = -cos(x)
If pi=6.28:       cos(x+pi) = cos(x)


Currently:   roots of unity e^(2*pi/n) = 0, 1, ..n-1
If pi=6.28   roots of unity e^(pi/n) = 0, 1, ..., n-1

And my all time favorite (the most beautiful equation ever written):

e^(pi * i) = -1

Now if we let pi = 6.28 we get:

e^(pi * i) = 1

Yes, we've improved the amazing.

So, while the mildly mannered geeks all celebrate today as pi day, I'll be waiting until June 28th to sit down and read "The Joy of Pi"  http://www.joyofpi.com/

Fun with Google's Latest Visualization Tool: Ngram Viewer

Late last year Google released another free tool called 'Ngram Viewer'  http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/.  It's similar to Google Trends but we're no longer limited our search to the last decade or so.  Google may not have existed in 1800, but they're now able to show how many times a particular word or phrase was in text by year.  When your spare time hobby is to scan in every book every written you can do interesting stuff.

Want to know how many times the word 'fuel' was written between 1800 and 2008?  Try it out, you'll some interesting things.

Linked are some I found interesting:


The Future is No Longer Now, it has been replaced with the Past:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=future%2Cpast&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3 


But we like to write about the years:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=1800%2C+1850%2C+1900%2C+1950%2C+2000&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Political Parties:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=republicans%2Cdemocrats%2Cwhigs&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Some of the presidents:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Roosevelt%2CNixon%2CReagan%2CBush%2CCarter%2CKennedy%2CLincoln%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Academic Subjects (stolen from Ben Shneiderman):
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=chemistry%2Cphysics%2Cbiology&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Burger King IS King:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=McDonalds%2CHardees%2CTaco+Bell%2C+Burger+King&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

GirlTalk and Computer Science, what more could a guy ask for?

Yes, it's no secret I love Girl Talk.  Who doesn't love this musical magician?  I swear he's using a computer program of some sorts to identify which music to use and how to blend it.  No mortal could EVER be that good.


It's also no secret I love computers.  I love technology (more than Kip I swear) and I'd hope the pursuit of my PHD in computer science is such an indication.  This semester I am taking Information Visualization taught by Ben Shneiderman.  Thus is was as if the stars aligned when one of my buddies sent me a link that has a nice visualization of the latest Girl Talk album 'All Day':

http://mashupbreakdown.com/

Finally I can see what song is being played at what point.  A few of the items are slightly off but I think this is a nice way to view Girl Talk's implementation.  It's insane to think he occasionally mixes up to 7 songs at a time.

Insane.