September 4, 2008

  • Gimme Some Feedback!

    If you haven’t noticed by now, we here at Xanga have started building a series of niche-focused partner sites, using the same technology that powers Xanga itself.  One of the projects that I worked on recently was site-wide forums, which you can check out right now on a few of the partner sites (forums.momaroo.com, forums.revelife.com, forums.xanga.hk).  We’re going to be adding forums to Xanga itself, and I’m curious to find out what you guys would like to see in them.  What kind of categories would you be interested in?  What features are most important to you in a forum?  What do you think of the current forum design?

    On a related note, I’m working on adding wiki functionality to our platform.  Think wikipedia (we’re going to use the same open-source software that powers their site).  The specifications aren’t finalized yet, so I’d appreciate any feedback on this feature as well.  Would you be interested in reading/editing site-wide wiki pages?  What topics would you be interested in?  Would you want your own personal wiki page that you could moderate, and if so, what would you use it for?

    Well, that’s all for now.  Happy blogging!

April 27, 2008

  • A Journey through Time and Space

    I saw The Forbidden Kingdom last night.  It was a fun movie.  And despite it being basically a pure action movie, it also got me thinking about something deeper.  Namely, the nature of time and the universe itself.  Not to give anything away, but the movie shares something in common with Back to the Future: the present is only possible because of events that the main character changed in the past.

    [warning: the following may hurt your brain, proceed at your own risk]

    Now, the most common theory of time travel you hear about is that the time traveller is actually traveling into an alternate universe.  Thus, a paradox wouldn’t arise if you, say, travelled back into the past and caused the death of your ancestors.  You would be able to change the future through your actions, even in a way that would prevent you from being born in that future, because you would actually have been born into a different future (in the universe you started from).  The problem with this idea is that there is no real explanation of how time travel would actually work.  How would you make that jump to an alternate universe?  But there is another way. 

    What if the passage of time were an illusion?  Physicists consider time to be a dimension just like the three axes of the spatial dimensions (hence the notion of spacetime).  It is possible that when the universe began, all of time began with it.  The past, present, and future would all exist simultaneously.  Our perception that time only moves forward could be just an illusion, because that is all our minds are capable of perceiving.

    This idea is comforting in one sense, because it bestows upon us a sort of immortality.  Even after we die, even if the universe collapses back upon itself, our entire lives will still exist as a timeless pattern through four dimensions.  But this idea is discomforting in another sense… it implies a lack of free will.  There really is no need to worry about that, however.  Whether we really have free will or not doesn’t change anything in our lives.  Wether we were pre-destined to make a decision or “chose” to make it, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

    So what does this all have to do with time travel?  Well, consider the universe.  It exists in three dimensions.  As a three-dimensional region, it has a shape to it.  The general shape could be a sphere, or it could be something more complex.  To see where I’m going with this, consider a flat (i.e. two-dimensional) piece of paper.  Of course, a piece of paper isn’t really two-dimensional since no matter how thin it is, it is still made up of three-dimensional partices, but bear with me. 

    If you were to draw two dots on opposite end of the paper, the shortest path between them would be a line running across the length of it.  However, if you took the paper and curved it back on itself in the third dimension, you could make the two dots touch.  Although the shortest path in the context of the two-dimensional surface of the paper is still that long line, the shortest path when considering this new third dimension is now reduced to zero. 

    If you were a two-dimensional being living within the surface of the paper, you would be unaware of this new path.  You wouldn’t be able to see into the third dimension, just as we are unable to see into the fourth dimension (i.e. time).  We only perceive our three-dimensional surroundings in the context of one point in time, wherever (or whenever, you could say) we happen to be.  Similarly, the 2-d being would only perceive its two-dimensional surroundings wherever it happens to be in 3-d space. 

    Now, if our 2-d being was somehow able to move past the “edges” of its 2-d universe, it would be able to travel between the faraway spots on the paper instantaneously.  Taking this idea to the third dimension, we have the concept of a wormhole.  If our 3-d space curves back onto itself in the fourth dimension, there can be two points in space that meet and thus could be instantaneously travelled between if we could only break through that “edge.”  Physicists believe that the incredible mass and density of black holes might create such large curvatures in space-time that a wormhole may be formed.

    Now, finally, we can see how all of this applies to time travel.  We can go one step further, and consider that four-dimensional space-time may curve back onto itself in the fifth dimension, if such a dimension exists.  VoilĂ !  We now have a wormhole through space and time (e.g. ‘the gate of no gate’ from The Forbidden Kingdom).

    edit: I recommend this cool animation as a way of visualizing higher dimensions.  It goes over ten dimensions, which interestingly coincides with the predictions of competing string theory models that there are either 10, 11, or 26 total dimensions.  Of course, string theory is still highly speculative at this point, as are the animation’s ideas about higher dimensions.

April 14, 2008

April 1, 2008

  • Recommend

    I haven’t posted recently, so I’ll say a little about what I’m working on.  I rolled out the recommend feature last week (thanks to Ayca for the design and Justin for integrating it into the feed).  Stay tuned for a module you can put on your home page that lists the items you’ve recently recommended.

    update – the recommended module is now released!  (act now, supplies are limited)

January 22, 2008

  • The Interweb

    In an interesting turn of events, I was anonymously quoted on one website that I read (Valleywag) based on a random comment I posted on another site (Digg).  It’s a small web after all.

    P.S. Valleywag edited my comment to make it seem harsher than I meant it to be.  I still love you Kevin Rose.

January 13, 2008

  • What are five random facts about you?

    1.  I’ve never owned a video game console (handheld not included).
    2.  I think that watching sports is a waste of time.
    3.  I have a prescription for contacts but I don’t wear them.
    4.  I take two showers a day.
    5.  My home computer is running win2k.  I’ve had it for 6 years.

    I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

December 24, 2007

December 21, 2007

December 10, 2007

  • The Amazing Race

    Deborah has been training for a triathlon for the past couple of months.  She’s really working hard for it, training every other day and even waking up for 7am(!!) group training on Saturdays.  Like me, she really likes to sleep in on the weekends, so I definitely appreciate the magnitude of this sacrifice. 

    She’s doing the triathlon to help raise money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.  I’m really proud of her for doing it, both in the way that she is pushing herself and raising money for a good cause.  So, please go show her some support, and if you can, make a donation toward her fundraising!  I know she’ll really appreciate it, and so will all the people you’ll be helping.

June 10, 2007

  • A plea

    Dear L.A. Sheriff’s Dept.,

    Please put Paris Hilton back in jail where she belongs, to maintain at least some semblance that celebrities must follow the same laws as everyone else.

    Sincerely,
    A concerned citizen

    update: The judge ordered Paris Hilton back to jail today, and she’s already back in!  That gives me hope, but right now she’s just staying in the medical ward while her lawyer appeals her sentence.  We’ll have to wait to see if justice truly prevails in the end.

    update #2: I am amazed by some of the comments from people defending Paris’ release.  She obviously has no respect for the law and thinks she is above it.  She was almost proven right in this case.

    This was not an unfairly harsh sentence.  Paris was a menace on the road and hopefully she realizes that now.  After getting her license suspended and put on probation for drunk driving, she just kept right on driving.  Even after being caught doing this once and not punished for it, she was caught yet again, this time going double the speed limit and without any headlights on at night.  It is lucky that nobody has been injured so far from her reckless driving.  The fact that she tried to appeal her sentence both before going to jail and again after, despite the fact that she was clearly guilty, again showed that she thought she could get away with it.

    For me this is not about hating Paris.  I think that she leads an utterly vacuous existence, but I don’t hate her.  This is about fairness and equality for all people under the law.  For every person like Paris who gets away with things because of money or fame, there is a poor person somewhere getting a more severe punishment than they deserve because they don’t have the money to hire a team of lawyers.  Paris’ release from jail was yet another example highlighting the inequities in our justice system.

    Now I hope you understand why Paris needed to serve out her sentence.  L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo put it well when he said that “This decision sends the message that no individual — no  matter how wealthy or powerful — is above the law. Today, justice was served.