The Setup Interviews is an interesting website which features interviews with professionals from different fields about the hardware/software they use on a daily basis. The interviews conclude with the interviewees being asked what their dream setup is. While most people tend to answer this question with some set of gizmos they’d like to own, I feel Matt Might got it right in his answer:

When I was young, I dreamed about building a “nerd cave” full of fast hardware, big monitors, sleek software and cool gadgets. I see now that technology can only nip at the margins of happiness, creativity and productivity relative to the effect of having sharp colleagues, good friends and close family nearby. I have many sharp colleagues that double as good friends. And, there’s an outside chance that in the next two or three years both of my brothers and all three of my sisters-in-law (each of whom is like an actual sister to me) will have joined me and my wife in Utah. I hope it happens. That’s my dream setup.

It’s the New Year and that means it’s time for change. I’ve finally moved my blog off wordpress.com and onto Github + Jekyll.

Jekyll has been a pleasure to deal with so far. The import from wordpress was mostly trivial but with some rough edges.

First, export your wordpress.com blog using the admin console (you should get an xml dump of your site) and then run:

# Assumes the XML dump is named wordpressdotcom.xml,
$: jekyll import wordpressdotcom

I only exported my posts because I wanted to setup pages myself. The above command should populate Jekyll’s _posts folder with your blog’s posts as html files.

I found the generated html to be rather mangled; there were no paragraph separations and blockquotes looked ugly. This required some monkey patching with sed and awk to fix. There are still some more loose edges left which I’ll get around to later. I’ve setup Disqus for comments, and I still need to import all the comments from the Wordpress site.

I’m currently on the Hyde theme which I modified a bit to suit my liking.

All in all, it’s been a breeze to deploy over Github and I’m quite happy to have a lot more control on how my site looks like.

In waiting for my combinatorial explosion of a factorial design experiment to complete, I decided to find out what my Erdos Number looks like, which is basically defined as the collaborative distance between yourself and the famous mathematician, Paul Erdos. Turns out, I have an Erdos number of 4 via the following chain of co-authorship.

/me -- Anja Feldmann -- Edward G. Coffman, Jr -- Joel H. Spencer -- Paul Erdős.

You can calculate your Erdos number here.

The last couple of paragraphs ought to resonate well with anyone who's obsessed with learning. To quote the email,

 

In order for you to navigate the increasing complexity of the 21st century you need a world-class education, and thankfully you have an opportunity to get one. I don’t just mean the education you get in class, but I mean the education you get in everything you do, every book you read, every conversation you have, every thought you think.

You need to optimize your life for learning.

You need to live and breath your education.

You need to be *obsessed* with your education.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that because you are surrounded by so many dazzlingly smart fellow students that means you’re no good. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And do not fall into the trap of thinking that you focusing on your education is a selfish thing. It’s not a selfish thing. It’s the most noble thing you could do.

Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age old search for human happiness and meaning.

That is why I am not canceling class tomorrow. Your education is really really important, not just to you, but in a far broader and wider reaching way than I think any of you have yet to fully appreciate.

[1] : http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2013-11-21/cal-lecturers-email-students-goes-viral-why-i-am-not