http://www.overheardinprovidence.com A blog by EERac Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:13:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Like most red-blooded Americans, I've spent the first half of this 4th of July traveling to Canada. In fact, I'm currently on the Airport Express traveling from Pearson International to the Sheraton Centre in stunning downtown Toronto. Amazingly, this bus has wifi (as well as posh leather-esque seating). Equally amazing, ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/07/04/oh-canada/ My girlfriend (a.k.a "Jessica") regularly laments her lack of feline companionship. At this point, kitten acquisition by summer's end appears inevitable. My primary concern is that a healthy subset of our friends claim to be allergic, and alas, the age of affordable hypoallergenic kitties has not yet arrived. More broadly, ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/06/25/kitty-in-the-city-cat-on-a-hat/ All you budding computer scientists our there are no doubt dying for me to resolve last months cliffhanger. As I stated last time, my goal with this series of posts is to describe the PCP Theorem in plain English. The PCP Theorem is a major result in the field of ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/06/20/computational-complexity-part-2/ 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 ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/06/04/moving-sculpture/ When you visit this blog, your computer sends a message to the computer that hosts this site. That computer, in turn, responds with the priceless content currently being displayed by your web browser. This simple exchange, in essence, is the purpose of the internet; it provides a way for computers ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/05/27/by-chance-flawed/ At the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias remains a leading advocate of pandas as the world's cutest bear. This photo, however, comes courtesy of James Fallows, another excellent Atlantic blogger and/or panda proponent (also he lives in Beijing). Since the giant panda is critically endangered, and also native to western China, ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/05/22/plural-pandas/ 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 ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/05/16/what-is-this-computational-complexity/ The scores of people who read this blog no doubt noticed that I've now gone well over two whole weeks without a post. Truly a tragedy. Now that the semester is (almost) over, I won't let it happen again (I'm going to shoot for a post every other day, so ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/05/11/a-return-to-blogging/ 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 ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/04/23/better-public-transit/ My girlfriend recently informed me that my post on malformed tomatoes was part of larger phenomena: the unusually-shaped vegetable (USV). The wikipedia entry contained some links eye-opening links, and after a comprehensive survey of USVs worldwide, I have determined that their most prominent public representative is the cubic watermelon. These box-shaped ... http://www.overheardinprovidence.com/2008/04/16/an-update-from-non-cs-land/