Get This Man a Doctor

After going to the front door of my delinquent advisor during Thanksgiving, I have sent three mailings, snail and other, to her. I still have no responses. So it looks like I’m back to being totally screwed.

Since I did end up paying huge bunches of money to my school, I kind of feel like they owe me one. So I’m writing a letter to the President asking him to do something, like round up all his other President buddies and get them to admit me anyways. It contains such gems as,

[…] I do know that my Reed education is intended to prepare me for further academic study. I also know it is in Reed’s best interest that its students have all the resources they need to get into any graduate program. Despite my commitment to resolve this issue, my inability to obtain a letter from my thesis advisor will be a serious detriment to my applications.

Will it work? Stay tuned to see.

The Official Google Webmaster Blog recently release an entry on Google’s fight against artificial manipulation of PageRank, namely comment spamming and link selling. Apparently, they have new algorithms to discount tampering with your search results by making yourself seem more popular than you are. From TFA:

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

Way to stick it to ‘em, Google. Will this stop certain marketing companies from violently abusing Google’s name? I highly doubt it.

Time magazine just eliminated all prestige associated with their Person of the Year issue by naming everyone currently alive as this year’s winner. Let the celebration begin.
What does it feel like to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year? Personally, I’m pretty stoked. In fact, I’ve just added it to the bottom of my resume. That’s right, please refer to me as Sean Kelly, Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year. I’m probably not going to be using that thing for another five years, so it doesn’t really matter.

The only problem is that this maverick issue is going to take a lot of allure out of the award. I mean sure, everyone born after 2006 won’t have the title like we do. So when we all die, there will be a fresh batch of losers to pick from. But until then, who will Time pick to up the ante next year? Time magazine’s 2007 Person of the Year—God?

On a side note, my favorite Wikipedia article of the day is Unsuccessful attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution. What? There’s a chance the ERA could still be ratified? Get to it, Pelosi!

While eating at my favorite secret Joya replacement, my girlfriend noticed for the first time that I was left-handed. I replied, “Yeah, that means I don’t have to do the ridiculous knife swap like you right-handed people.” Which incited the argument.

Like the peeflap on briefs or driving on the left side of the street, the right-handed knife shuffle is one of those things that you never really think about when you’re outside the affected demographic. I never really knew that right-handed people had such a hard time using a knife until much later in life, when I suddenly realized someone was taking a ridiculously long time eating a steak. In fact, it took a lot of ’splaining to get me to understand what was going on.

When you’re left-handed, cutting something on your plate involves three simple steps:

1. Pick up knife in right hand,
2. Stab and cut food, and finally,
3. Put food in mouth.

I think this is perfectly normal until one day when I realize that right-handed people don’t have it so easy. They have their fork in their right hand, which is the same the knife is lying on. There are variations, but the shuffle seems to be something like:

1. Move fork from right hand to left hand,
2. Pick up knife with right hand,
3. Stab and cut food,
4. Put knife down on table,
5. Move fork from left hand to right hand,
6. Stab food (again!) and put in mouth.

When I pointed this out to the girlfriend, her response was that her left hand was exceptionally weak, which is why she did the shuffle. She also claimed that left-handed people “live in a right-handed world” and have to be a little ambidextrous, which is why we can cut with our right hand.

Personally, I think if it was a “right-handed world”, they would have put the fork on the right side. But that’s just me.

So now we need to conduct a study on whether or not the right-handed knife shuffle really exists, and what its cause is. Let’s see if DARPA will fund this.

Today is a crappily glorious day, or a gloriously crappy day depending on how you look at it. Today I gave up any hope of getting into UC Berkeley and submitted my application. I have to say that my essay royally stunk, which is odd because it was adapted from a much awesomer essay that I submitted to U Maryland.

But at least it’s in and I can stop staying awake at night, like I’ve literally been doing for the past week. Happy hour helped a little, but I think it was an illusion caused by the fact that my hostess actually went to bed the same time I did.

I received one of my recommendations. Two to go. I still have not heard back from the professor I chased down, despite sending two emails. Am I willing to fly back to Portland before January 2 when the Berkeley recommendations are due? I’ll have to think about it. I would say that this whole process is driving me nuts, except my job had the privilege of doing that first.

Dear Freshdirect,

I like your site, but I think you should take a cue from Netflix and work to get more user feedback. I’d start with a product rating system that would allow the user to give products a starred rating (be creative—star fruit? seasonal produce?) while they are looking at the product. After you make a delivery, email the customer again with a link that says “Rate your order”, that allows the user to give you feedback *in no more than three clicks* (click - Rate your orders, click - Tomatoes weren’t fresh enough, click - submit). Randomly conduct surveys on the site with no more than three questions in one page. More feedback (trust me, not everything I have ordered from you has been fresh, but I have no desire to go write you a message for everything I get that is sub-par. As a user, I’ll quietly just go somewhere else. That’s how the Internet works). I would recommend the book “The User Is Always Right” by Steve Mulder.

If you need any help with this, you can contact me at sean@seanscv.com.

—

Dear Sean,

Thank you for contacting FreshDirect. Awesome ideas! Your suggestions have been received and will not go unnoticed. We will consider the ideas you’ve provided and hope to feature it on our site in the near future. Thank you for your feedback!

If you have any other questions, please call us toll-free at 1-866-283-7374. We’re here Sunday-Thursday 6:30am-1am and on Fridays from 6:30am-11pm. On Saturdays, we are available to assist you from 7:30am-10pm. Or, you may email us at service@freshdirect.com.

Sincerely,

Lena

Dear Amazon.com,

In April of 2006, I was on your site and you offered me a free trial of your Prime membership account. You told me that I could get free two day shipping on anything I bought. And boy were you right. I was buying things like crazy—when I can get stuff in two days at no extra cost, why should I ever leave home?

But then the trial ended, and you wanted me to pay $79 a year for the membership. You thought you could trick me by automatically signing me up for the membership when the trial ended, but I found the secret setting to turn that off.

What you don’t seem to realize, Amazon, is that I don’t have to shop at your store. I’m not willing to pay premium prices for the luxury of shopping at home. Didn’t we learn that when the dotcoms crashed?

I’m including a graph of all of my purchases with Amazon.com for this year. I hope you take a moment to look at it and reconsider how much you are selling your Prime membership for. Something in the less-than-eighty-dollar range would be better for me.

Sincerely,

Sean

I just got done watching a video from Slashdot. The title of the article was Crank Doesn’t Understand Division. Oh wait, it might of had a more deceptive Slashdotesque title, but I don’t really want to give it pagerank-credence by linking directly to it.

Anyways, it links to a video of some dude claiming to have solved the “two thousand year old problem” (verbally. really.) of . His innovative idea is that is an algebraically consistent number, and he labels it , pronounced “nullity”. Oh, and is also a number, and it’s infinity.

Now, there’s nothing crazy about claiming that infinity is a number, or that there are positive numbers that are smaller than every positive real number. But then he goes to the board and starts writing out an equation that treats and just like fractions.

Okay, let . That is, is the multiplicative inverse of 0. Then by definition, it must multiply with 0 to obtain 1. In the video, Herr Doctor Professor claims that multiplying the numerator and denominator of fractions holds with infinity and nullity. So,

So the magical “nullity” number in the video is actually equal to one. Hmm….

On the first day of abstract algebra, you have to prove that you can’t divide by zero without either redefining multiplication or proving a contradiction. If there was a multiplicative inverse of zero, say , then we would have,

Which is generally not a good result.

To see an examination of infinitesimally small and infinitely large numbers that isn’t crazy, read about surreal or hyperreal numbers.