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A new course at Berkeley: StarCraft Theory and Strategy. This is the actual course description:

I’ve never played StarCraft (I’m a big fan of Warzone 2100) but this is pretty cool. Or scary. I’m not sure which.

Oh, and bonus points that you need calculus and differential equations to “fully understand” the course.

I’m writing a proposal (whee!) and I meant to type the word “telecommuting” but instead ended up with “telecommuning”.

It made me laugh… I suppose telecommuning would involve some sort of long-distance spiritual link with someone, and perhaps some ohhhhmmmmm chanting.

Yay, jury duty!

The amazing un-fall-like weather continues; today the thermometer topped 70 degrees. It was sunny with a few wispy clouds, so after taking the opportunity to wash my car, I hopped on my bike and tooled around town a bit.

I had my camera with me and captured a few cool things along the way.

Global warming is probably a bad thing, but I can’t say I’m complaining too much when it’s almost 70 degrees on November 5th. Wow.

I’m listening to some tunes and one of the classics by 2nu came on. It made me think of Nardo Polo, the legendary guy mentioned in several of the songs by that band.

On a whim I checked out Urban Dictionary to see if he was that legendary. Indeed, he is.

It reminds me of one of the ultimate teams I put together for a tournament back in the mid-1990’s. My friend Mike “Cheese” Monterastelli and I were co-captains of the team, and both of us loved 2nu, so I suggested that we name our team The Greatest Marble Players Who Ever Lived. Awesome. It sure confused the other teams, though…

Ahh, orange juice… the sweet, sweet nectar of the gods.

As I do every day, I’m enjoying a snack which includes a nice tall glass of orange juice. I’ve been drinking this stuff daily for as long as I can remember– probably 30 years or more. I chug about two quarts of it a day, and apparently a single 8-ounce glass will give you 100% of the recommended dose of vitamin C for the day. Doing the math, I’m getting about eight times the C I need. Good stuff.

Yep, autumn is finally here. Despite beautiful 70-degree sunny days, the trees have decided it’s time to bunk down for the winter. The tree in our backyard has turned a brilliant red and yellow and looks awesome.

Alex just asked me what letter is most common in the English language. I told him it was “e” (everyone knows that, right?) and following that is either “s” or “t”.

But I’m a curious kind of guy, and since I was sitting on the bed using my laptop anyway, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to set up a series of shell commands that would do this for me. I knew how to access the spell-checking dictionary, and from there it was just a matter of chaining together the right pipes to take all of the words from the dictionary, break them down, and count the letters.

Here’s the command:

aspell -d en dump master | tr A-Z a-z | sed s/./”&\n”/g | grep [a-z] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

And the results:

It’s not surprising that “e” was on top, with “s” right behind, but I could’ve sworn “t” was more popular than that. Upon further thought, I suspect the data is a bit skewed because this is the dictionary and words like “the” only appear once. In spoken or written English, it appears much more often than words like, say, “phlegm”.

So to be more realistic, I should use a book instead of the dictionary. Of course I have a copy of Moby Dick handy… I use it for all of the testing I do in web sites. One change to the command above gives me the count from the novel instead:

cat moby-dick.txt | tr A-Z a-z | sed s/./”&\n”/g | grep [a-z] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

The answer? Things are a bit different:

Once again “e” trumps the rest, but now it’s “t” in second place and “s” has dropped down a bit. How odd. Even more interesting is the fact that “q” isn’t dead last– it’s 22nd. My theory on that: there’s a character in Moby Dick named Queequeg, and the mere mention of his name probably bumps the letter up the list.

This is hardly scientific, but all in all it’s a decent test. And yes, I’m a complete geek for taking three minutes to figure out how to do this.

It was October 1990 when I was first introduced to the sport of ultimate by my friend Matt Groves. I was hooked immediately, and absolutely loved playing. For the next five years in college I was legendary (well, at least in my own mind) and was always the guy rounding up a group to go out and play. “Bah, that homework can wait until later,” was probably used many times as I worked to convince my friends to head down to Schuman Park in Rolla for another game.

What’s funny is although we knew the rules, we really didn’t know a lot of the mechanics of the game. The forehand throw was completely unknown. Hammers and scoobers? Never heard of ’em. Even something as basic as the force was outside our experience. But no matter– we had a great time and eventually built up a big group of ultimate players. We took road trips to play in tournaments, where we discovered these new techniques and took them back to hone our skills.

Since that fateful day, I don’t think a month has gone by where I haven’t played at least a few games here and there. In the summer, of course, I typically play four days a week, and on occasion I’ve played five and six days in a week (Sunday is my only day off). As the weather gets colder and the league seasons wind down, it’s a little more sporadic, but you’ll still find my local pickup group out on the field wearing long sleeves and gloves, slogging through the snow just so we can get in another game.

Twenty years. That’s a long time to do anything consistently. I guess it means I really love the game.

Here’s a photo from the early 90’s. That’s me at the bottom center, and although you can’t see it from the picture, I’m not wearing shoes. Even then, two decades ago, I was Shoeless Jeff. And I still am.