Web Design Unleashed, and A Day As Natasha's Sidekick

They say that the age of novelty websites is over, but yesterday I found a beautiful counterexample. Observe the 8th wonder of the world:

Elite Web Design In Action

I came upon this diamond in the rough while weighing my lunch options, and instantly knew I was in the presence of greatness when I saw their page title bravely set to "Page Title" (the thing you see up top on the browser bar, like "Gmail - Inbox 6,091,018" is what HTML-freaks call the 'page title'). It takes guts to do that, kind of like rhyming a word with itself in a poem - only authorized badasses do it with impunity.

Now, this is an Asian food restaurant as evidenced by the Big Words on the home page. However, these appear to be Asians of the Latin variety/persuasion as the Aboutus and Contactus menu items indicate. ...Hmm, the joke seems to lose power in retelling, they did it much better... Actually, it's almost proof that they're authentic Asians, as in Chinese and Japanese there are no spaces between words in a sentence. What better advertisement of hole-in-the-wall-Asian-restaurant authenticity than English illiteracy. Anyway, no more needs to be said. Go get some food there, and learn some of the latest tricks in web design.

I walked a couple of hours in Natasha's shoes today. Their lack of duct-tape to seal holes is neatly balanced by a lack of holes, so I wholeheartedly pronounce them wearable. That is until I put them on and had to duct tape them shut. But back to not being side-tracked, the shoes were actually figurative as you so cleverly guessed. I accompanied Natasha to one of her classes, and hung out at her department observing the local wildlife - nerdy graduate students who actually care about what they're studying, a species I long thought to be extinct. The class was up to the boring-class standards at MIT, and though I didn't fall asleep, I was the only one to not do so. MIT 1 - Dartmouth 0.

Then we went to the store and bought some food on the math department budget because today is Natasha's turn to buy food on the math department's budget. The food is intended for public consumption. During checkout, despite Natasha's threats about the Green-Earth Nazis at the bagging station forcing you to use the dreaded handle-less paper bags, after answering "do you prefer paper or plastic?" with "meh," I received a plastic one. I'm sure Natasha holding a semi-automatic Colt M1911 to each of their heads is just an irrelevant coincidence.

When we came back and served the food to the hungry math dorks, I was treated to the rare spectacle of a young woman single-handedly devouring an entire package of hummus in about 23 seconds. And now I must go throw up because I once again hit the replay button on that memory.

Ellen: how r u?
Ellen: warm?
Mark: yes
Ellen: buy yourself a hat
Mark: will do

Moral? She's (whoever she is) going to say it (whatever it is) no matter what, so be flexible in your perception of her flow of logic. And agree with her for Chrissakes, don't you have any self-preservation instinct?

For laymen's eyes only

I was helping Franco a bit with his math homework today. He's in a class that shatters all records for lack of applications. I said on the previous post that my college experience was generally useless. Well, this class is to my college experience as my college experience is to Manswers. Somewhere between useless factorial and worthless to the good-for-nothingth power.

They learn about different sets of numbers, and how those sets are defined. These are not even interesting sets, like numbers that turn into letters when flipped upside down, enabling one to type dirty words in a calculator. They're boring numbers with "properties," a favorite word among nerds. About the only thing interesting about them are their names, and even here, interesting is a hyperbole of a hyperbole.

Lucky, deficient, perfect, happy, hungry, sociable, vampire, narcissistic, powerful, aspiring, abundant, odious, and the list goes on.

And then, as I read this list, I began to feel myself getting more and more nauseous. For it had dawned on me that this list was indeed important, and in a way I had never dreamed. Reading these silly words, I came to a horrifying and now seemingly obvious conclusion. This is a conspiracy spearheaded by mathematicians!

Psh, you may say. What's their purpose? Well I'll tell you. To turn our everyday conversations into math-talk. Given fifty years, we'll all be talking in equations with about as much awareness as we currently have for curse words. And then, once we're all talking math and not English and Chinese, we won't be able to distinguish nerds from jocks, the bullies from the bullied. It will be an apocalypse.

The clues to this conspiracy are everywhere, but we've been blinded by our disdain for those four-eyed evil-smelling geniuses. Mathematicians have been working up to this step for thousands of years without raising a hair of suspicion until now, on this blog. Has no one except me noticed that mathematicians use letters even more than numbers? The governments of most countries (minus New Zealand) are very lax in this respect. Mathematicians are almost outside the law. But now they've gone far enough. I can't even say I'm hungry in the privacy of my own quarter of an apartment without sounding like a nerd. I say we get our languages back from the nerds. Numbers for nerds, letters for laymen. Who's with me?