Come for the jokes, stay for the nonsense. This site contains my ramblings about programming, developer relations, stuff I’m working on, and the occasional machine learning/data mining pop culture mashup.
Recently I wrote about calculating the “peak” season of Seinfeld. In that post, I ranked the seasons by computing a single metric based on the results of twenty top 10 and worst 10 episode lists that I collected from various online sources. In this post, I use the same sources to compute the answers to who are the best performing and worst performing Seinfeld writers and guest...
During a recent voicemail segment on Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP), Rob Cesternino and Angie Caunce, discussed former-NBA player Scot Pollard’s performance so far in Survivor Kaoh Rong. Specifically, they asked the question: Is Scot Pollard the best big man to ever play survivor? There’s been a number of rather tall men that have played Survivor: Mitchell Olson, Australian Outback...
I am a big fan of both Survivor and the Survivor-related podcasts on Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP). One of the weekly segments Rob does during the Survivor season is a voicemail segment with a guest host. Rob and his guest host spend about an hour each week answering questions related to the latest episode. In a recent voicemail segment with Amy H, they talked about how it would be interesting to...
The Seinfeld Recap Podcast is one of my favorite podcasts on Post Show Recaps and if you’re a Seinfeld fan, I highly recommend it. Recently I wrote about how I extracted 20 questions from the The Seinfeld Recap Podcast. One of the hosts, Akiva Wienerkur, has ranked all 180 episodes of Seinfeld. In each episode, he lets us know where the episode falls in his rankings. In the last episode...
Well I’m back again with a follow up project to my original Seinfeld Recap Podcast work that I posted about a few weeks ago (you can here me talk about this project here). The genesis of my latest project came from a suggestion by Mike Bloom. He had contacted me and suggested that it might be interesting to look at how different podcasts and their hosts use language. I started thinking...
If you are unfamiliar with The Genius, then you can read my summary and pitch below. If you are already well-versed, then you can skip ahead to my discussion of the game Monorail. Even without ever watching the show if you enjoy strategy games, you will likely love Monorail. Just want to play the game and don’t care about what I have to say? Go to www.MonorailTheGame.com. Check out the code...
I recently started watching History channel’s show Smartest Guy in the Room. The basic premise of the show is there’s three kind of regular guys with regular jobs, but each of them have high IQs. Each episode one of the three designs two challenges in an attempt to stump the other two. If the challenge designer stumps them, he gets the title of “Smartest Guy in the Room”...
It’s been almost three years, but I’m back again with another super nerdy blog post! I’ve written a lot in the past about different computer programs or stats stuff that I’ve written, usually related to programming competitions, ontologies, and CrossFit, but today, something a little different. I have been a big fan of Rob Has a Podcast and PostShowRecaps almost since...
It has seriously been a long time since I’ve blogged. Ever since leaving academics to start a company (Proven.com) with my business partner Pablo Fuentes, I’ve either not had time to dedicate to my blog or not had topics that I could really share in a public domain. Luckily, I had a nice side project idea recently mashing together two of my loves, CrossFit and programming. For those...
One of my colleagues from WorkerExpress, Joe Mellin, invited me to join him for a design workshop being put on by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Joe is a former graduate of the d.School’s masters program. I’m interested in design and I even taught principles of user-centered design for a Human Computer Interaction course at the University of Victoria, so I was...
