Wednesday, May 21, 2003

 

So, the first girl I ever kissed, Cara Spallone called me a few days ago to tell me she's engaged. This is pretty cool, and seemed worth noting, here. Congratulations, Cara & Paul!

. . .

If you google her name, the fifth hit is an excerpt from a letter I once wrote her, that I have on my website: Nagasaki. Despite her science-minded beginnings (we actually met at a science fair) I guess she never developed a web-presence like some of my other old friends. :-) But really, who needs this web-thing?

It's almost as bad as Cable TV, I think. Mostly just a waste of time. We broke down and got cable last week, because of an addiction to watching the NBA playoffs, just in time to see both of our teams go down in defeat. Anyway, the web is maybe worse, right, because you have to be at home to watch cable, whereas you can waste your whole day on the web while at work.

Sometimes, however, this INTERNET thing comes in downright handy. Like when you need to know where Bruce Chen is from, when you've forgotten (Panama!), or when you need to answer the question, what's the difference between the standard deviation and the standard error of the mean? (the standard deviation is a characteristic of a real-world distribution; the standard error is an indicator of how confident you are in your estimate of the mean of a real-world distribution, based on your sampling - this is a big difference.) These are real-world examples of the INTERNET being useful!

If you really want the INTERNET to be useful, though, you have to become a hax0r, like that Trinity chick, who looks like my girlfriend.

posted by Miles 5:56 PM