Ramanujan Redux

Really, this again?

WuChess, a partnership between Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and ChessPark, a social network around online chess playing, launches today. It’s the “world’s first online chess and hip hop community” and will also include exclusive videos and mp3 of the “hottest cats in hip hop.”

See a tour of the service here. That’s as far as most of you’ll get on WuChess, because, incredibly, they’re charging $48/year to join. ChessPark, by contrast, at least has a free version (but no videos or mp3s, sadly). The company promises to donate “a portion of the profits” to the Hip Hop Chess Federation.

Awesome. Hip hop, chess and $48 per year - definite winner.

I wouldn’t pay $50 to talk to most celebrities, much less match wits with RZA. Only Charles Barkley makes the cut right now.

The Internet is free for a reason–it’s to make us more open to each other, not to allow the richer and the privileged among us insider access. It’s to bring us on the same level, not place celebrities on a pedestal. Yardbarker allows athletes the opportunity to connect with their fans. Why can’t celebrities acknowledge that they’re human too?

Whenever you get the opportunity to finish something (a degree, a job offer, a market), finish the job. Do not worry about the friends and family you’ll leave behind by starting or finishing

Idleness will doom you. Don’t dawdle around. You’ll only waste time, or worse, lose your shot at opportunities you’ll always regret. Didn’t you learn anything from Mortal Kombat?

The NBA is inhabited by the land of giants. A tall man’s world. The land where seven-footers rule and no one else can match our strength.

Yet who has won the last four Finals MVPs?
2007-Tony Parker
2006-Dwayne Wade
2005-Tim Duncan (although you could make a case for Manu Ginobili)
2004-Chauncey Billups

These are guards moving past big men. They may be taller and stronger. But you are stronger in other areas.

As we see Chris Paul motor his way through the playoffs, forcing the defending champions to give everything they have to stay alive, you realize that you already have what you need. You may be a small man in a big man’s world, in business, in law, in sports. But it means only a little. You were born with your genetics. But you create your own will. You go as far as you choose to go.

Read this post by Razib this weekend, and it got me thinking, which is always a bad sign. It usually means something stupid’s about to come out of my mouth, so bear with me.

One thing that Razib points out is the fundamental difference between gender and genre. Males enjoy plot-driven stories, escapist fiction. We don’t want to focus on characters and their development, we want storyline and plot. Get to the point, get to the next point, etc. Women enjoy more of the character development stuff, the writing prose, etc. etc.

So I was wondering–is our interest in certain books wired into our own primitive desires? Do we like certain books because they fire up a part of our own evolutionary structure?

Think about it. Men enjoy plot-based books, with an aura of mystery but also of adventure and exploration. Books have the power to take us away. It takes us away from the burden of work and responsibility, provides us refuge from the toil we endure. We have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families, and while the gender gap has made dramatic shifts in the past 200 years, our brains don’t evolve nearly as fast.

Just like the supposed theory that our bodies have supposedly not caught up to agricultural products toxifying our body, our brains have not yet fully caught up to the idea that women can now bear equal responsibility, so it takes our own growth and development in life to adjust to this. Because of the growing amount of entertainment options in the Internet age and the relegation of books to a niche activity among the XYs, many of us never do.

Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been groomed to find mates. Unlike male, whose work, intelligence, wealth, and physical stature defined him, a female was traditionally defined by the strength of her partner. So it became important for her to find that character, and that required deep examination of human psychology to attract suitable mates. So isn’t it natural that females would enjoy books that involved deep character study and soothing words of comfort and seduction?

(Another possibility is that if females were not happy with the mates they got, they could dream up their ideal Cassanova to escape the doom and gloom of their situation. Hence the continuing popularity of harlequin novels for women in completely unsatisfying marriages.)

I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.

Sound familiar?

There’s my crock theory. Someone please tear it apart.

What’s the next step for the Internet? We’ve reached stagnancy. Information is organized pretty well, we can track people with RSS.

Managing that chaos might be the next step. What if there was an application that tracked all your conversations (blog comments, message board responses, Facebook wall replies, )? CoComment tried it but the format was too cumbersome. Email can track some, but not all of these things. Could there be a Google Conversations in the future that manages our outreach and our communities so we don’t lose track of the open conversations we have on the Internet?

The benefits of such a program are tangible: It avoids the cumbersome nature of clicking back page after page after page. It centralizes the flow of conversation while decentralizing the conversations itself.

Friendfeed is the primitive form of such conversations, but it only deals with some programs and not all. Twitter deals with this on a micro level, but it’s me-centric. Me me me me me. What needs to be emphasized is US so that people don’t feel like they’re floating on an iceberg.

A message board is the perfect example of loose collaboration. People have ideas, other people respond to them. However, there are so many things we’re interested in that it becomes difficult to find every board every day. Message boards are still very insular in that sense–a conversation application that emphasizes each other rather than ourselves.

A big problem with the Internet today is communication. People are still ensconced within their own bubbles that it’s hard to cut through the noise and keep in touch with people.

Just a thought.

There isn’t much of an upside to sleeping for ten hours or more–generally you only need six and a half to eight, and as a college student you desire even less than that. But I’ve found value in recording my dreams, and I hope this inspires other people to do the same.

I’ll try to record them as I go.

04/29/08: I’m back at high school visiting, although I wouldn’t be caught going back here. For some reason half the dreams I remember have me back in high school. I hated high school. Can someone tell me why I’m here? Christ.

04/6/08: I’m with one of the hottest girls I’ve ever met. My family is all around me. WHY. This girl morphs into another cute girl I’ve known since childhood. I finally convince myself to stay back instead of going with the family (Idiot). She kisses me anyway. And I wake up and wonder how much longer I’m going to dream about these things.

04/5/08: I’m on a bus with a zombie, and I’m pretty nonchalant about it because he’s busy making out with the hot chick in the next seat. Makes perfect sense.

03/26/08: Every girl I’ve ever been attracted to in real life (whether from a distance, as friends, etc.) begins to email me asking me for dates. I feel flattered, then immediately wake up and feel enraged.
Thanks to Batman, I remember that dreams are a function of the right brain and that you can’t create sentences in these type of dreams, so all the emails and IM convos made absolutely no sense and were just random strings of words like “will come today you?”. Then again, when I was younger, I also assumed hot women were ditzy dumb blondes who couldn’t speak english. So these sentences didn’t seem too far-fetched.

03/05/08: I only remember passing by a bus with a friend and waving and saying ‘hi’ to her. Only she had one leg. She usually has two. She was pretty happy about the whole thing.

03/04/08: I think it’s Christmas dinner, although instead of being in DC (where I spent last Christmas), I’m eating in my new family installed house. There is a young couple and a wandering drunk. I think I also spend some time in a bookstore, which is useless since you can’t read in a dream. Talk about lame.

03/03/08: I have no idea what the hell is going on. I think I’m in an eighty story building, near the top floor, in something that reminds me remotely of Star Wars. Then I go down the escalator (an extremely long escalator, at least fifteen times bigger than that scary as hell one at Woodley), struggle with a rare case of vertigo and try my best not to start stumbling down.

As I get to the bottom (I think I ran down or flash-forwarded it) and realize that it’s some sort of Star Wars museum. I pass by someone named Nancy Reagan and someone asks me if I’ve seen Nancy Reagan and I tell him she passed by. My dad is interested in the exhibits. This alerts me immediately to the idea that this is a dream because my dad has never been intersted. And of course I’m awake seconds later.

03/02/08: I remember figments. Here I’m back in an idyllic high school (I have no idea where, but there are lots of trees around), just in my college self. And there are certain moments when girls approach me and ask me for help in math class. That’s cool. This happened in real life too. When I was so insecure and depressed I didn’t know what to do with myself. Whatever. Such is life as a teenager.

I remember getting on and off a bus, but don’t really remember what happened on the bus. I also remember coming back for my pencil. I don’t even remember what the hell was in the pencil.

And I walk a lot. I always walk a lot in my dreams.

Okay, that’s a little harsh. But the more I look at it, playing out the clock for your degree is not getting you anywhere but middle management hell. You’ll get a job with nice pay, but probably nothing you love doing.

What’s more important? Befriending a professor. Doing meaningful social work. Reaching out to others. Finding people equally passionate in what you enjoy. Taking a risk. Not shirking away from responsibility. Knowing what you’re comfortable with. That’s what useful about college.

College is a place to discover what you don’t want to be. Everything after that crystallizes what it is you want.

You know what’s okay? Making them.

You know what’s not? Avoiding them.

An expert in a field isn’t someone who has to call his or herself an expert. If they didn’t have the title of ‘expert’, you probably wouldn’t know who these people were at all.

There’s a reason that Daily Show correspondents are referred to as “experts”.

I’ve just been thinking about better ways to brand a site and to get people clicking on linkrolls. Some linkrolls are longer than the number of books an average person reads in their lifetime.

Wouldn’t a logo search service be useful? People respond better to imagery on a page than the name of a site. I don’t know how many people would click on RamanujanRedux if they saw it on someone’s blogroll–they’d likely ignore it.

Internal media networks like Gawker and Rudius have recognizable imagery that define the sites on their system visually (GaijinSmash for the win!). Internally, the sites do well. But for external blogrolls, do people really click on the site after the first time?

Some reasons why logos might work:

1) It shows that you care enough about the site to put the logo trademark on the back.
2) It provides a visual stimulus after glossing your eyes over with gallons of text.
3) A lot of people judge sites on their first reaction. If the logo was displayed alongside the Google search result, it could raise a decent amount of interest.
4) It provides an anchor image to associate with your site, so that your name doesn’t easily get forgotten.

For example, for my Cal football site, would seeing this image on another site’s blogroll you were visiting increase your interest at crossing over to check it out? Because I’m guessing you wouldn’t if it was just the title. Images matter.

Anyway, what I’ve been saying is that it seems clickthrough rates for links outside your network are pretty atrocious. Some sprucing might need to be done to keep raising the bar on ratcheting up the importance of searching for brands and attracting attention at first glance. Make the Internet prettier.