Many mathematicians will be familiar with the Erdős number, a measure of “collaborative distance.” Those outside of the math world might be more familiar with the Bacon number, from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, measuring the number of co-appearances an actor is from Kevin Bacon. An Erdős number is pretty much the same thing but for writing papers with mathematician Paul Erdős.

While I am not quite a mathematician, being a student of Computer Science, I have the opportunity to associate with those skilled in Mathematics. I took it upon myself to determine if I had a finite Erdős number. It turns out I do.

According to the instructions at the Erdős Number Project, I used the AMS MathSciNet Collaboration Distance search to find the answer.

I have documented my findings below; the last three lines of the table were determined via MathSciNet, the first two by personal knowledge. I was pleased to find my number is so low and am proud to declare my finding.

As promised, I’m continuing to post previously abandoned entries as time permits.

Vint Cerf visited my university the week of April 9 to talk about issues and challenges that will face the internet in 2007 and beyond. The talks were quite interesting–just my sort of chat. Of course understanding net neutrality was on the list of topics, but I really appreciated hearing that even an important fellow like Vint really wants a fast, symmetrical net connection at home, and can still talk about the finer points of IPv6. Many thanks to Dan Peterson for helping arrange all of this. I had the additional privilege of meeting Dr. Cerf and demoing LaserLine 2.0 with Chad. He was exceptionally nice, and would instantly grasp whatever concept was being discussed. It was really a lot of fun.

Speaking of LaserLine 2.0… Leopard isn’t out yet, so there is still all of this stuff under NDA to WWDC attendees… And if there were Leopard specific features, they couldn’t be added to a public branch of LaserLine available on the Trac site… I’m not saying anything here, I’m just encouraging readers to think about Leopard, and how it is going to have cool new features like Quick Look… that’s all.

In order to make this blog post more useful, I will disclose first tips for skipping voicemail greetings. According to a couple of websites, one may simply press the appropriate key (varying by carrier) during a voicemail greeting to be instantly forwarded to the beep:

• T-Mobile - #
• Cingular - #
• Sprint - 1
• Verizon - 1

I have yet to try all these out. Additionally, “*” may work if these fail. If I would much appreciate comments if anyone has first hand experience of other numbers working with other carriers in the Chicagoland area, or corrections in order to make this the canonical reference for the midwest.

Hopefully this will save everyone lots of time in life.

But none of the preceding information has anything to do with San Francisco. I very much enjoyed my trip there for WWDC and am anxious to release some of the code I’ve been working on which utilizes Leopard technologies. It’ll have to wait until October. The trip was great for reasons beyond just the conference though, I had fun seeing Helvetica with Chad. I also bought a new Freitag wallet.

Though there were some low points to the trip. I was trying to play Taboo, but upon opening up the box I found the AA batteries had leaked, and I got some acid on my hand, leaving me with an unsightly acid burn. I also chipped my tooth.

Finally, while I was out there I had the opportunity to work on the Justin.tv widget a bit more. Look for a new version, supporting all the new channels soon.

Just a quick pano from my window here at the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco. WWDC has been a lot of fun, part due to the excellent accommodations I was lucky enough to obtain for the conference. If you look carefully, you can see the tall statue in the center of Union Square.

As the semester was coming to a close, I spent so much of my time on finishing projects and such, I had no opportunity to update this very blog. I wish I had, because all sorts of interesting things happened between spring break and now. I’ll try to get some of those long-time-coming posts up, as time permits.


So without further ado…

March twenty-fifth marked the end of spring break and the beginning of a culinary adventure. Defrosting was an unknown; I hadn’t time to move my prospective main course to the refrigerator in time for it to become anything other than a rock of ice. After some work I managed to produce this:

I let the roast defrost in warm water in the sink, against health recommendations, and stuck it in the oven for the recommended time, according to my Betty Crocker Cookbook. Some simple seasonings and Bragg Liquid Aminos was all it took to produce the roast, then some mashed potatoes out of a box and I had a fine meal, which I shared with my friend Chad. I’m sorry my vegetarian friends.

Lately I’ve been going to bed when the “Forecast at a Glance” thing says “TODAY” as the first box, rather than “TONIGHT.” This is a problem because I keep getting up way late. I am not tired to fall asleep any earlier. Perhaps when I have to start getting up for work this will change; either way, this is currently a non-optimal situation. I still don’t manage to get enough done during the day, even things I could do at off hours, such as prepare many eBay Auctions, or write insightful, interesting blog posts. I’ll try to do some of that tomorrow (today). Either way, please buy my stuff on eBay.

First some 4:00 am frisbee at the Siebel Center for Computer Science, and then 6 miles of 8:30 am fun! Concluded with a nice glass of iced tea at Espresso Royale in Champaign. Did you know the United States is the only country that prefers iced tea over hot tea? Staying up all night is my favourite!

Updates to follow. And there are so many updates. Only one more year of undergraduate study.