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Your local (or not-so-local) scientist is currently busy trying to figure out many things, including cures to terminal illnesses, ways to make the environment safer and the reason why reality TV is so popular. But on top of that, there are numerous other things that have researchers scratching their heads, wondering basically why the universe doesn't collapse on itself and why aliens keep playing peekaboo.
Surely by now, you've started to realize that many of those ads you see on the Internet for free stuff might just be bogus.
Of course, there might be some truth to the "free" part, but that could involve talking to a sales rep for 53 hours, wrestling an alligator or taking part in a survey about going to the bathroom in foreign countries.
If only college basketball could take precedence over other things, like work, sleep, eating, etc., it would be possible to consume all of the necessary information to select a perfect bracket this year. Most of us, though, do need to continue our regular life, and due to unforeseen upsets, all of the information available still might not help us win our office pools.
But it doesn't hurt to try. Here are a couple of sites you should be familiar with, so you'll be ready when the brackets are finally announced:
Maybe you've heard of Sequoia Capital, Craig Newmark and Deep Blue, but do you know what they have in common? They are part of Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web.
It's hard to believe that Yahoo has been around for 10 years already. I remember the first version of Yahoo, amazingly enough. Things have changed a lot.
If you haven't noticed, there's a lot of stuff on the World Wide Web. For some people, that might be a good thing, but for the rest of us, who seemingly waste numerous hours a day, looking for those things we missed (like the Lip Balm Anonymous site), it's somewhat nerve-racking to explore it all.
I will be appearing at the following locations in the near future to talk about and sign The Developers. If you want to check out the book, feel free to stop by, take a look and ask questions. I won't hound you like your mom does to eat vegetables (I've noticed other authors doing that, and it's generally pretty scary.).
One big disadvantage working at night is the television quality when I arrive home. Sometimes there could be a "Perfect Strangers" rerun or two, and possibly an old game show, but most channels are overrun by infomercials.
Webster defines an infomercial as "a long television commercial, often made to resemble a talk show, educational demonstration, interview, etc." Kudos to Webster's assessment. The only words missing from the definition are "trash," "ridiculous" and "cheap."
Lately I've been reading "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller. It's a great book
(watch for a review in the future), but I noticed last week that the
paperback price tag was 95 cents. The copy I'm reading is nearly 50
years old, but even still, how could the publisher make money selling
books for under a buck?
Some of you are probably familiar with the Performance Against Seed Expectations (PASE) metric used with the men's tournament brackets. In short, the metric takes into account how many games a seed is expected to win based on past performances since 1985 (the first year of the 64-team tournament). I use this metric to determine expected offensive statistical totals for the college basketball fantasy league that I run each March.
While there is a bounty of useful items on the Internet, there is also that vague area of things that serve some purpose, but by themselves, would be utterly useless.
An obvious example of this is a Web counter. Create a Web page by putting nothing on it other than a counter. Put it on the Web. What does it prove? If people actually go to your site, they are insane? True, but in a sense, we already know that everyone is crazy.