Five years, 6 addresses, 250 units later, and I will graduate from UCSD a double major in computer science and biology (with bioinformatics specialization). Click the link below for directions to the commencement, Sunday June 13th at 8:30 AM. Emotion to follow.

Next time you're wondering why pharmaceuticals cost so much, and why we just decided to spend so much on a prescription drug bill, remember this quote:

"Prosecutors said Warner-Lambert turned Neurontin into a blockbuster drug with tactics like paying doctors to listen to pitches for unapproved uses and treating them to luxury trips to Hawaii, Florida or the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One doctor received almost $308,000 to tout Neurontin at conferences."

Unless advertising spending is brought under control, don't expect this sort of corrupt marketing practice to change.

There was a poll at macosxhints.com asking how many cords users have for their computers. So I did a little checking:

Each of the following have both a power cord and a data cord (USB, FireWire, or VGA): Printer, Floppy, CD burner, external hard drive, scanner, monitor, 1 powered USB hub (7x2=14)

Each of the following only have a single USB cable: SmartMedia reader, keyboard, mouse, 2 unpowered USB hubs (5). There's also a dangling cord which is used by my digital camera (so, 6).

The computer itself has a power cord and an ethernet cord (2) which links to a powered ethernet hub (2) = 4

The ethernet cord runs to the apartment router (I'm not including my roomate's computers) (2) which runs to the cable modem (2) = 4.

Between them all I use 3 power strips (3). My computer, though, goes to a UPS (1 extra cord) which has USB monitoring (1 more USB cord). = 4

Total: 33 cords. I'm frightened.

I was typing in my password to PGP when I began to wonder: In order to have passwords that are equally hard to break, how much longer would a simple password have to be than a complex password?

For the task I define a simple password as being made up of just lowercase characters and spaces, 27 possible characters, and a complex password as being formed from lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and punctuation -- 26 * 2 + 43 = 95 possible characters.

The number of possible passwords of a certain length l using a certain number of characters c is the number of characters to the power of the length of the password. So to find a ratio of the length of complex passwords to simple passwords which each have the same cracking difficulty, we find:

27^L = 95^M where L = the length of a simple password and M = the length of a complex password of equal difficulty.

Taking the log of both sides, we have L log (27) = M log (95).

log (27) = 1.431 and log (95) = 1.978. Divide both sides by log (27) and we have:

L = 1.38 * M

So a simple password need only be about a third longer than a complex password to be equally safe.

Anything that uses matricies has to be good. Check out Condorcet voting method, which sounds to me much more effective than instant runoff voting or simple plurality at determining that ever-so-mystical and essentially mythical "Will Of The People."