King  Gary 

Something Awful wrote an article talking about Wikipedia, discussing that if you take two articles that are similar (the example they give is Knight and Jedi Knight), then you would see that the article that is more related to nerds, which is the latter in this case, is longer and more comprehensive than the former.

TechCrunch also picked up on this, and Michael agreed with Something Awful and the claims that it makes. He says that “People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.”

I digress.

The examples that are given include the following:

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

I will analyze the first two examples, below.

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The past four months have gone by so quickly that they seem to be a blur. I’ve spent that time at university for the first time in my life, and I’ve met countless new people, some whom I’m certain will become life-long friends.

I have also learned a lot about myself while at university that I wouldn’t have otherwise figured out on my own. This list is in no way comprehensive, as I’ve definitely changed in many more ways than I can count (primarily in a good way), and I hope that spending more time at university will help me to better figure out who I am. Here are some things that I’ve learned about myself and about life in general:

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Okay, so it isn’t such a big question to ask; but, work has, for a long time, been something that people did in order to pay the bills and to buy the occasional item that they desired but didn’t require. It wasn’t something that they were supposed to enjoy; no, instead, the very idea of work as something that people could love doing was just out of the question.

Why, then, do people today still choose to work in professions that they don’t quite enjoy? Stereotypes shouldn’t be applied, and yet, even without trying to, they are seen all over university campuses everywhere. Take the University of Waterloo, which is where I am currently enrolled. Programs such as accounting have a much higher ratio of Asians-to-Caucasians than, say, engineering. Even gender stereotypes still exist; the male-to-female ratio in the Faculty of Mathematics is 72:28, and in the Faculty of Engineering, it’s 78:22. But in the Faculty of Arts, the ratio is 29:71. One of the primary causes for this huge imbalance is stereotypes.

In my English course that I’m taking this term, we’re doing research projects on one of four topics; one of the topics is ‘women in mathematics.’ The goal of that topic is to come to a conclusion of why there are such low enrollment numbers of women in the Faculty of Mathematics, and how this can be resolved. A good chunk of the women in mathematics are in it because - surprise, surprise - they actually love it.

I just came back from my English class today, where all the groups did their presentations on what they’ve learned and researched. One of the groups that did their presentation on Women in Mathematics mentioned that what we should do to increase popularity and change the views of women about math, is to make bigger changes at a younger age. So for instance, in pre-school, girls usually play with dolls, and the boys usually play with building blocks (a stereotype, yes, but one that’s pretty accurate.) The boys building blocks is more than just a way to spend their time; it also helps them with their analytical and problem solving skills. They figure out where blocks go to build the desired object that they wish to build. Girls play with dolls, and the primary thing that they get out of it is creativity, but in a very limited way, because dolls aren’t as abstract as blocks and therefore can’t be applied to as large a field of subjects. Blocks are very abstract, and so boys can take the knowledge that they learned in pre-school, build on it and hone their skills, and then apply block building to, say, building computer software, or constructing the next Eiffel Tower.

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Now isn’t this the best dorm room carpet or what?

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This is an open letter to the students whom I know that can’t seem to get their sleeping patterns right:

Procrastination. It’s something that almost every teenager learns to do while they are in an educational institution. And I don’t mean procrastination in a light sense; I mean it in the heaviest sense. In the sense that, handing an assignment in to the drop box at university 5 minutes before it’s due is deemed acceptable, as long as it’s handed in. The ends justifies the means… doesn’t it? The educational system teaches that, as long as we hand in our assignments BEFORE a specified date and time, then we are in the free. School is the perfect place to help us teenagers hone our procrastination skills, and in higher education, there is no single better place for us to improve our procrastination skills to the fullest extent. I mean, why should we hand in our assignments a day or two before it’s due, when we live on campus, and thus, we can work on our assignments the night it’s due, walk to the drop box and hand it in before that 8:20 am due date? Pshaw!

Oh, right. Our health. Irregular sleeping patterns! But, that’s all secondary, anyways. Who needs health when we have our youthful youthness? And our caffeinated Tim Horton’s coffee, famed Iced Cappuccino’s, and much beloved Jolt Cola and Bawls? Not us! We’d rather procrastinate our work to as late as possible, and instead, spend our time peeking in every nook and cranny of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in order to find all the easter eggs to fulfill our life’s goal of finally completing that darn game to 100%.

“But wait, I heard that procrastination was bad for you!” Well, Johnny, you must have heard wrong. Because in fact, it stimulates action at the most predictable times - hours, or minutes, before some task is due. Who wants that unpredictability of having work done several days or weeks before it’s due? It’s far better to be able to know that you’ll start on a project a few hours before that dreaded due date instead. It adds that predictability factor to our lives. Plus, we can throw time management out the window, as the only thing we have to keep in mind is the due date, and then we’ll automatically scramble to complete our work once the time has come. So, it all works out in the end, doesn’t it?

The statements made in this blog entry are in no way the views and opinions of Gary King, the author of this blog, and do not represent his way of thinking. You can blame it on the little devil who sits atop his right shoulder instead, since that’s the guy that takes all the blame, anyways.

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I’ve been having a problem these past few days: I sleep from 5 am - 3 pm. And, personally, I think I suffer from a mild case of insomnia, so that doesn’t make it any easier to fall asleep - especially when I’m not tired; even when it’s, say, 3 am, I’m not tired. Heck - it’s 5:15 am right now as I’m typing this post, and I can’t get to sleep!

There are really three options to go with to try to solve this problem:

1. Force myself to sleep and then wake up at 7:30 am, which is when I wake up during school days. The advantage of this would be that I’m set into my regular sleeping pattern immediately, but the disadvantage would be that I would be on roughly 1 hour of sleep for a day - which isn’t any fun at all.
2. Force myself to sleep and then wake up at a later time, say, 11 am, so that I more gradually get into my regular sleeping pattern again, which is the advantage. The disadvantage would be that I might not be sleepy by 11 pm or so, which is when I’m trying to get to bed so that I can wake up in time the next day at 7: 30 am.
3. Don’t sleep tonight and just sleeping the next night. Advantage? Not requiring to force myself to sleep. The disadvantage? No sleep for a day.

So there you have it. I’m aiming for option #2 since I know I’d suffer from lack of sleep with #1. I also have an algebra midterm this monday (tomorrow) and a calculus midterm the next monday, so I really should get well rested for those.

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Today was BarCampWaterloo. It’s the first one, ever, in Waterloo, and so I was excited to go, especially since I’ve gone to a few TorCamps in Toronto, and had a blast. This event was no different, and it was at least a great first meeting to get to know all these new people, and to finally meet people that I’ve only talked to online, such as Shawn Allison, Chris Erbach, Michael Fagan , Mitch Hargreaves, and Jesse Rodgers.

Later on in the night, I watched the movie Hard Candy with some guys in my residence building, and yes, I was scarred for life. Thanks Shawn!

And then late, late at night, we went through two whole apartment buildings, room by room, to find some friends of mine (there are name tags on the doors so you know who lives there.) It took a while, but we eventually found them. We then came back home, and now I’m typing this at 5 am. G’nite!

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Our kitchen counter, before dishwashing:

And the counter, after dishwashing:

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It’s that time of year! 4 stream co-op students at the University of Waterloo are applying for jobs and preparing for interviews that will take place in October. I’ve applied to some of the ‘typical’ jobs found in the JobMine database, of course, but I want to look outside of the jobs provided by companies through the university in order to find a job that is better suited for me.

So, if anyone knows of a company that is looking to fill the position of some sort of junior web developer, then please let me know and we can talk!

Thanks!

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I’ve been a bit sick the last few days, so I’ve been sleeping a lot during the day (although I suppose that’s not that different from my usual routine.) So that has sucked a lot of fun out of the past few days.

On the flip side, I managed to pass the ELPE, which is an exam to test who can write proper English and who can’t. I was surprised to find out that about 30-40% of students in the Faculty of Mathematics had failed this - something which I was not that much expecting, but now I suppose I’m more happy that I passed it.

I also bumped into two high school friends today, Jiasen (living off-campus) and Joanne (living at UWP). We talked for a few minutes, and then we went to visit Simon, another high school friend, who lived at Conrad Grebel. We stayed for a bit, and watched him play Heroes of Might & Magic and his roommate play Starcraft, and then we went to visit Jackson, yet another high school friend, who lived at Renison. So in the end, I saw four high school friends that I hadn’t seen yet during my stay here at Waterloo, and the five of us all live in separate residences, as well!

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