Author Archives: Anand Sarwate

a new drinking game

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My roommate found a die in his pocket ostensibly from an undergrad party he attended earlier this weekend. As it turns out, it was not from the party, but for the sake of the following analysis we assume that it was. We then attempted to reverse-engineer an undergraduate/fratboy drinking game using this die. We regarded it as a sort of anthropological venture given an artifact from a specific site site, i.e. a UC Berkeley undergraduate party. As it turns out, the die only had the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on it, but it could be played with any 6-sided die if you take the number showing modulo 3.

The game is to be played by two people, A and B. They each roll the die to get a and b points for A and B respectively. If a > b then B must drink (a-b) shots of beer. If a < b then A must drink (b – a) shots of beer. If a = b then it is a draw and no beer will be drunk.

In the fratboy version of the game, play proceeds until one person passes out. In the UC Berkeley version, play proceeds until one person throws up. In the more tame home version of the game, play proceeds until one player reaches a total of 50 points — that player is the winner.

tokenizing

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I posted a while back about how Cover and Thomas’s book was posted online now, but it turns out that the license for online access uses “tokens.” Once Berkeley has run out of “tokens,” access is denied to the book. This is one of the stupidest decisions I have ever heard of, akin to the music industry’s head-in-the-sand approach to digital music. The way in which online book resources are used is different from print medium, and to force the library to buy more tokens is akin to selling someone a book which they can read only a certain number of times. I’m not saying that they should not charge at all for the book, or that they should charge less than for a library-bound hard copy, but this token system displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how books are used. I wonder if the person who designed this system has ever had to use a book other than “How To Stick Your Head Up Your Ass for Dummies.”

Yes, I’m angry.

beach bum

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I’m in Monterey today and went down to the beach with my high school friend Zhenya. I wish I had brought my camera, because the beach was full of life:

  • hundreds of little crab legs everywhere, and some dismembered crab thoraxes (thoraces, thoraxi?) here and there. It’s a bit creepy to have legs wash over your feet all the time
  • lots of little trilobite-like mollusks and shrimps, washed up and crushed
  • a flock of a thousand black birds which we couldn’t identify. They fly very low to the water and don’t dive in from the air to get their food; they swim around in the ocean like ducks and dive down.
  • these cute birds with long beaks that pecked at the wet sand and then skittered off as the waves came in. They were super-cute.
  • ladybugs desperately trying to escape the salt water waves, with limited success. I’m not sure why there were ladybugs on the beach at all, actually. Perhaps they were having a ladybug picnic.

The sun was warm and the ocean was cool. The beach rules.

hardcore

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So I was biking down Channing this evening and had to slow down because a ten year old was trying to jump his skateboard up onto the divider that forces left turns for cars. As I edged my way past, he turned and twisted his face into a grimace.

“Hardcore!” he announced.

“Rock on!” I replied, and went on my way.

article question

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Suppose I have a phrase, like “measure-preserving transformation” which I abbreviate by “MPT.” Would I then say “T is a MPT” or “T is an MPT?” My gut instinct is that I would write the former and speak the latter, but that’s inconsistent. It’s probably the latter, since it’s “em pee tee,” right?

leading the blind

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I parked my bike near the library this morning, masking my inability to make it up the hill by my need to return some books. As I walked across the brick and concrete landing to the main entrance, I passed two students on a bench commenting on a blind man making his way by fits and starts to the door. “Oops, there he goes,” giggled one. “He’ll make it in ok,” commented the other.
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time for a book

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I just read Snow Crash for the first time, and I have to admit that I was a little disappointed, but not because I thought the book was trite. It is, after all, a product of its time, and its vision of avatars in the Metaverse has affected the discourse on the way in which we view human-computer interaction. I was disappointed in myself for not having read it earlier, say in high school, when my friend Usama was ranting about what a piece of genius it was.

It’s not the same feeling as wishing you had discovered an author or book earlier. For one thing, I had very strong feelings about when I should have read it. I would have spent more time digesting some of the more tedious connections like “language is a virus” and “the operating system of a society” to understand them. The second difference is that I felt reading it now diminished the book’s power. Not only did I give some of the analogies short shrift, I felt that they detracted from the narrative drive.

This led me to wonder about whether other books have their time and place in people’s lives. The Catcher In The Rye is a good candidate, but what about Lord of The Rings? Are there books that should be read ideally upon reaching middle age? Upon retirement? Reaching college? Losing your virginity? I don’t believe that every book should be associated with a rite of passage or vice-versa. But I do think some books have maximum punch at a certain time in your life, and while you can put yourself in that position again when you read it, it’s not the same as being there.

Lessig

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Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and Culture and Control Creativity is available for free under a Creative Commons license. Although it’s not unprecedented in the world of academic publishing, this is being done though Penguin Books and is for a (relatively) mass-market book. I, for one, am pretty excited.

Is this going to stop me from going to my local bookstore and browsing a copy on the shelf before deciding to buy it? No. But it allows me to do a pale imitation of skimming a book from my office when I don’t have the luxury of meandering down to the bookstore. I don’t really know anyone who can stand to read a book entirely on a screen (be it CRT, LCD, or plasma), but perhaps I know only the vocal minority. I probably will read the first chapter of his book — more thoughts on that later.