The Facebook Ghetto

Česky: Logo Facebooku English: Facebook logo E...

Image of Evil Incarnate via Wikipedia

I don’t like Facebook.

I don’t like that it sets cookies and follows you everywhere else that you go on the web. Privacy concerns, buzz words, etc. I don’t like that CNN.com asks me to comment on an article — or shows me what other friends of mine have read on some news site. And finally, I just don’t like Facebook as a company.

However, Facebook is undeniably useful. Especially since I moved to the other side of the world, Facebook gives me a simple way to maintain a connection with the people back home.

So, I have a problem: how do I utilize Facebook without allowing it to have access to information it doesn’t deserve? Let me answer that question with a short digression on browsers.

Browsers

As much as I don’t like Facebook, I also don’t like Safari. I prefer either Firefox or Chrome to Safari (do I even have to mention Internet Explorer?). I’ve started using Chrome to the point where it’s my main browser. What does this have to do with Facebook? Because my hatred of Safari allows a solution for the problems that I have with Facebook.

My Solution

On my computer, Facebook is placed into a restricted ghetto called Safari. Since I dislike both Facebook and Safari, I’m killing two birds with one stone. Emphasis on killing. So every time I use Facebook, it’s exclusively through Safari, and I never sign into Facebook with my Chrome browser. I do all of my non-Facebook interneting in Chrome — free from the soulless all-watching eyes of Facebook. Make Safari and exclusively Facebook browser.

If you like/dislike different browsers than me, make whatever browser you dislike into your own Facebook ghetto.

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There’s still plenty of time to be a genius!

Stern-Gerlach Experiment de

Image via Wikipedia

There was an interesting article that showed up in many places that had some neat information in it. It also didn’t really explore one of the things that struck me as interesting.

The article(s) is MSN: The stroke of genius strikes later in life today. It talks about the idea that scientists do their best work before the age of 30.

It turns out that it definitely USED to be generally true; but it has increasingly not been the case. It turns out that for physics at least, 48 is the average age at which their most genius work is done.

Cool.

One thing that struck me was this sentence:
“In fact, in 1923, the proportion of physicists who did their breakthrough work by age 30 peaked at 31 percent. Those who did their best work by age 40 peaked in 1934 at 78 percent.”

Let’s keep those numbers in mind for a minute. Consider for a second that it was a certain generation of physicists who bring about the Quantum Mechanics revolution, and not a particular age. Let’s consider the generation born in 1893-4.

If this generation was in the proper place due to an accident of birth, they might have the lion’s share of substantial breakthroughs over a twenty year span or so. This group of physicists would have turned 30 in 1923-24. This same group of physicists would have turned 40 in 1933-34.

So, it’s the same generation in both cases, the only thing that differed was when their “best work” was considered to have occurred. In fact, since the percentages peaked in both decades, it appears that that generation is the one that dominated physics for twenty years.

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Suggestions for Moving to Melbourne

September 27, 2011

Now that I’ve been here just over a month, I decided to write down a few of the suggestions that I had about relocating to Melbourne while it is still relatively fresh in my head. Finances Step 0. Take out Aussie $$ via ATMs from your US $$ accounts. Step 1. Get an Aussie bank [...]

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Left the US for Oz

August 6, 2011

Do you ever get the feeling that your presence holds everything together, and that if you leave it’ll all collapse? This feeling almost never reflects reality, and if you get it frequently and think it’s true, it’s probably often sign of a narcissistic personality disorder. That being said, I left the US on Monday, and [...]

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The Future of Education

March 11, 2011

I think that the future of education is an amazingly interesting idea to kick around. To begin with, I fully recommend watching the video of Salman Khan at TED where he talks about his Khan academy (I’ve embedded the talk below). This Khan academy is a nonprofit that he started after several tutorial videos that [...]

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Moving to Melbourne, Australia

March 7, 2011

I accepted an offer to work at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia! I’ll start this August, and I’ll be there for at least 2 (probably 3) years. I’m working as a “Postdoctoral Research Associate in Extragalactic Fundamental Physics” — that’s the official title — and I’m very excited! All I have to do [...]

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Using Dropbox and Git to write LaTeX papers

March 2, 2011

First things first — Dropbox is awesome. (Also, if you signup through that link, we both get extra free space… so do it). It’s a service that syncs a folder on your computer with a central server — and any other computers you have Dropbox installed on. But it does much more than that — [...]

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Jonathan plays the piano…

March 1, 2011

I was messing around and recorded myself playing Gershwin’s Prelude 2 (which is still under copyright, funny enough). I’ve been meaning to force myself to record and post myself playing piano more frequently in an effort to publicly shame myself into practicing more… It’s only working a little. As always, I welcome constructive criticism!

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Making PyMinuit play nice on Ubuntu

February 14, 2011

I finally have a working python setup on my Ubuntu desktop that has all the bells and whistles that I want at the same time with the same setup. The python setup I use comes from the Enthought Python Distribution. System specs: Ubuntu 10.10 x86 64-bit Python 2.7.1 |EPD 7.0-1 (64-bit)| (r271:86832, Nov 29 2010, [...]

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My first 10K

February 12, 2011

So, my first half marathon turned into my first 10K race: The Death Valley Borax 10K. A few other friends I talked into running came with me and in the end Stephanie and Jeff raced and completed the half marathon, while Kelsey kindly ran the 10K with me. Death Valley is a beautiful place — [...]

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