Googly Gossip
Wow, what an awesome day, start to finish.
I missed the first half of the Y! research talk today, here at the 'Workshop on MMDS' but I'm soo glad I drove my butt down there. I was really surprised that both Google and Yahoo -ers seemed to miss the boat on what seems like the obvious way to generalize the auction pricing schemes (sorry I don't know the specific language, but I hadn't heard the auction slot pricing problem formalized until this morning).
Yesterday's highlight for me was hearing That Yale Theorist guy (don't know how he identifies professionally by subsubfield) talk. Yeppers, random graph theory is cool. Well, 'random graph' theory is cool... random 'graph theory' isn't.
Today's coolness was the ador-something-ism-able Muthu, and I got a chance to finally meet him in person. He had to talk to someone on the phone so I couldn't tell him more about one of my ideas in sociocombinatorial algorithms, or about why G & Y seem to have broken pricing schemes (at least they seem that way to me, without thinking about it too much).
Dr. DAS seemed to like the idea that "the theory of self-interest is a self-fulfilling prophecy" (borrowed from some NYTimes byline, I think) and I'm looking forward to talking more with Muthu.
But, oh the gossip! Here it is. You didn't hear it from me...
So it turns out that Larry's name is still on an office down the hall from me in Gates... but his name is upside down :o
Even juicier, I happened to have lunch in "the Netscape" building, as someone called it, and one of the guys said he mentored Sergey when Sergey was but a high school student. And guess what, he used a linked list to implement a sparse matrix data structure. Scandalous! I bet you really want to know, though, was it circularly linked?!
Finally, omg, Muthu has cool hair. I didn't ask to touch his hair but I was somewhat tempted to ask what he thinks about asking about this particular hand-hair intersection problem...
During the day, I thought for a while about doing a "zero-day startup" after lunch -- I'll explain another day -- but I started telling researchers that I'm a zeroth year student here at Stanford (no point in googfuscating, really, right?) cuz that's what I am :D
And so, after this exciting day, I decided to commit and invest in some real hardware from the very same F* electronics store.
This time, there's yet another tale, but it has a happy ending. I have a MacBook Pro on my lap, you'll have to ask Muthu after tomorrow about her name, and she's beautiful and hella smart, I'm sure. In particular, her ATI gfx hardware is going to have a blast at lab, and, perhaps, even as a visitor to this year's 'GRAPH.
Ah, my first Apple. My first OS X blog post. Cheer! A globe thingy is bouncing, which I think means that my new Mac wants to go to sleep and wake up again. I suppose I should do the same ^_^
I missed the first half of the Y! research talk today, here at the 'Workshop on MMDS' but I'm soo glad I drove my butt down there. I was really surprised that both Google and Yahoo -ers seemed to miss the boat on what seems like the obvious way to generalize the auction pricing schemes (sorry I don't know the specific language, but I hadn't heard the auction slot pricing problem formalized until this morning).
Yesterday's highlight for me was hearing That Yale Theorist guy (don't know how he identifies professionally by subsubfield) talk. Yeppers, random graph theory is cool. Well, 'random graph' theory is cool... random 'graph theory' isn't.
Today's coolness was the ador-something-ism-able Muthu, and I got a chance to finally meet him in person. He had to talk to someone on the phone so I couldn't tell him more about one of my ideas in sociocombinatorial algorithms, or about why G & Y seem to have broken pricing schemes (at least they seem that way to me, without thinking about it too much).
Dr. DAS seemed to like the idea that "the theory of self-interest is a self-fulfilling prophecy" (borrowed from some NYTimes byline, I think) and I'm looking forward to talking more with Muthu.
But, oh the gossip! Here it is. You didn't hear it from me...
So it turns out that Larry's name is still on an office down the hall from me in Gates... but his name is upside down :o
Even juicier, I happened to have lunch in "the Netscape" building, as someone called it, and one of the guys said he mentored Sergey when Sergey was but a high school student. And guess what, he used a linked list to implement a sparse matrix data structure. Scandalous! I bet you really want to know, though, was it circularly linked?!
Finally, omg, Muthu has cool hair. I didn't ask to touch his hair but I was somewhat tempted to ask what he thinks about asking about this particular hand-hair intersection problem...
During the day, I thought for a while about doing a "zero-day startup" after lunch -- I'll explain another day -- but I started telling researchers that I'm a zeroth year student here at Stanford (no point in googfuscating, really, right?) cuz that's what I am :D
And so, after this exciting day, I decided to commit and invest in some real hardware from the very same F* electronics store.
This time, there's yet another tale, but it has a happy ending. I have a MacBook Pro on my lap, you'll have to ask Muthu after tomorrow about her name, and she's beautiful and hella smart, I'm sure. In particular, her ATI gfx hardware is going to have a blast at lab, and, perhaps, even as a visitor to this year's 'GRAPH.
Ah, my first Apple. My first OS X blog post. Cheer! A globe thingy is bouncing, which I think means that my new Mac wants to go to sleep and wake up again. I suppose I should do the same ^_^
posted by L. Wu @ 10:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home