overheard in providence

A brief educational retrospective:
1999: Eric graduates Stuyvesant Highschool and begins attending Brown University. At the time, he foolishly assumes that his affiliation with Brown will be limited to a mere four years.
2003: Eric graduates from Brown University with an Bachelor of Science in Applied Math/CS. In a shrewd attempt to avoid joining the workforce, or [...]

According to a relatively recent New York Times article, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs tracked by the blog search engine Technorati have been updated in the last 120 days. This blog has become perilously close to falling into that neglected 95%, as my last post is dated February 18th, 2009 (although to [...]

Way back in the 20th century, before I had committed to a lifetime of study at Brown, I was foolish enough to apply early to MIT. Thankfully I was deferred and later rejected (on my 18th/golden birthday no less!), but not before paying a visit to their lovely campus and seeing the MIT museum. Even [...]

Last month I mentioned that I was helping teach CS 159, a class entitled “Introduction to Computational Complexity”. I also mentioned that my interest in this subject is one of the main reason I ended up majoring in computer science. I didn’t, however, get a chance to explain what computational complexity is. Now that the [...]

Yesterday I discovered (and subsequently announced) that Google Transit had finally come to Rhode Island. For those not familiar, Google Transit allows any public transportation system to integrate their route information with the “get directions” feature on google maps. Brilliantly, the service is completely free, so all a city needs to do to take advantage [...]

Since the beginning of last week, I’ve been busy teaching my advisor’s class on computational complexity. Complexity theory isn’t really my area of research, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I became a computer science major. When the class is over I plan on blogging about some of the topics. People seem to have [...]

A few days ago my friend Matt flagged this n + 1 essay on Adderall use among Ivy League college students. In December, I attended a discussion with Randy Cohen (author of The Ethicist), and of the dozen or so questions submitted by attendees, four had to do with Adderall. After reading the n + [...]

Au Bon Pain (or “ABP” as we Brown kids call it) now offers a bacon and cheese mini loaf that looks a lot like the southwest cornbread they used to sell. I bought a mini loaf yesterday while hurrying to a class, but about half way through, decided I much prefer my cornbread meat-free. I [...]

The Brown campus is in the midst of some major construction. After a rather obtrusive utilities upgrade, Brown will boldly connect it’s Main Green to the Pembroke campus. This noble effort is known as “The Walk”. It involves many stages of demolition and construction, and threatens to tear down all structures that stand in its [...]