Such a happy nerd day today. Was in a small meeting outside and had this marked in my calendar--after 3.5 hours of talking, suddenly stood up and said we all had to go to a wide screen; masked up and got it up and running 6 minutes before. So many happy nerdy people! So exciting!

THAT KID'S A FUCKING NERD!

...

and I will be proud if my boys are so nerdy when they're in 8th grade

Because I am white and nerdy: Did you know that Donny Osmond has a condition known as Situs Inversus? It means his internal organs are flipped left to right compared to most people.
[url redacted]

Your video, "Weird Al" Yankovic - White & Nerdy (Take #1), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I feel I should offer explanation for my confusion....especially since I don't think I'm alone in what I thought.
I only knew what tv news had said about Aziz, which was nothing like the article. I'm not a fan, so I know nothing else about him beyond a few tv appearances and his nerdy image.
TV implied a normal date, followed by consensual, but awful, sex, and didn't reflect her accusations in the least.
This written described behaviour wouldn't be acceptable with an open minded prostitute, forget a date.

But, I think this spotlights the problem with not making distinctions, it allowed the day long argument without ever discussing actual facts and accusations, because without distinctions, it didn't matter if he was just a bumbler who's bad at sex or an aggressive monster.

I think there needs to be a clear line set for #metoo (though I'm unsure how or exactly where that line belongs) so it cannot be painted as just bitter people seeking revenge for a bad date.
That is how the Aziz thing looked without reading the article and just going by "news".

Interesting and good, but it missed an opportunity to talk about another reason that Clinton removed the scrambling that reduced accuracy to ~100m in 2000:

It was fairly easily circumvented.

Your GPS device isn't sending anything TO the satellites -- just receiving FROM them. So, the scrambling had to be done on a system-wide scale; it couldn't skew your location 37m to the west and your friend a block away 62m northeast. So, every device in a particular area (that can see the same satellites) would be skewed by essentially the same distance and direction.

That means that all you needed to circumvent the scrambling was a GPS device relatively nearby at a known latitude and longitude. Then you took the GPS reported coordinates of that device and compared them to the known coordinates, and badda-bing you've got the skew figured out.

I remember that system being used to overcome the scrambling in the late 90's for robotics / AI competitions where things like early versions of drones or other robots had to autonomously navigate a maze or move towards some particular target coordinates.

Basically, if nerdy robotics enthusiasts could circumvent the scrambling, surely a motivated enemy military or terrorist group could too. So, there wasn't much point in continuing it. Ending the scrambling was a good thing for Clinton to do, but I'm sure that impracticality played just as much if not more of a part in his decision as benevolence towards citizens of the Earth / potential economic rewards for American companies did...

(**EDIT** hmm, code HTML tag doesn't seem to allow whitespace to show at the beginning of lines, so I'm replacing spaces with _underscores_ in the pseudocode below)

Code uses spaces or tabs to visually distinguish the flow of the program, what code belongs to what functions / loops / whatever.

Here's some C-style "pseudocode" that should get the idea across:

void function fizzbuzz {
__for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
____set print_number to true;
____If i is divisible by 3
______print "Fizz";
______set print_number to false;
____If i is divisible by 5
______print "Buzz";
______set print_number to false;
____If print_number, print i;
____print a newline;
__}
}

The braces { } show the beginning and ending of a "function" (essentially one of potentially many self-contained algorithms in a program) and the beginning and ending of a "for loop" (that will repeat the code inside it some number of times). And the "if" statements will only perform the stuff after them IF the test they perform evaluates to true.

So in that pseudocode, there's sort of 4 tiers or things going on. First is the function (named "fizzbuzz"). Since functions are kind of the most basic structural unit of the code, they are on the far left -- not indented at all. Sorta like Roman Numerals in an outline.

Then, the actual content of that function (the code that makes up its algorithm) is set a consistent amount of space to the right to make it clear that it is contained inside the function. That can be done with *1* tab, or some consistent amount of spaces so that it lines up. The only thing in that tier is the "for loop" and the braces that show its beginning and end.

Then the content of the for loop is set a bit further to the right (with another space or another set number of spaces). All of the "if" statements are at that 3rd tier level, along with a bit more code at the beginning and end. Then, the actual content of the if statements is set one more tier to the right to help distinguish that it will only run IF the conditions are met.

That pseudocode uses spaces for all of the tiering -- 2 spaces per tier. I'm a tab person like the guy Richard in the video, because it seems easier to press tab once per tier than hitting the spacebar 2/3/4 times per tier. But it really is just a personal preference issue, because as he said in the video, by the time the code is compiled (turned into an executable file that the computer can run) the final result will be the same whether the programmer used spaces or tabs.

But like with many things, Silicon Valley really hits the nail on the head here. Programmers tend to be very set in their ways and anal about their style preferences for code. If we have to go through someone else's code that doesn't follow our style conventions exactly, it kinda tends to throw us out of whack. To make an analogy with something less nerdy, consider how annoying it can be when someone borrows your car and you have to adjust the seat / mirrors / radio stations etc. when you get back in.

Yeah, that's a bit of a stretch... Funny, but a stretch.

The bit about "what does the ring DO?!" in the beginning was interesting to me because that is one thing that I also dislike about Tolkien's works (as a nerdy reader of the Silmarillion like Soren in the video). The three elven rings Narya, Nenya, and Vilya all grant enhanced "elemental" type powers (for example, Gandalf has Narya, which is why he's got the beefy fire magic). Invisibility seems like a pretty poor ultimate power for the *ONE* ring (yes, there are other features, but invisibility is the primary *active* power of the ring).

Personally, I think that it would be cooler if the mighty *one* ring granted the single ability that any individual user would be most tempted to use, and eventually ABuse -- to facilitate its corruption of the wearer. Smeagol/Gollum, Bilbo, and Frodo, being Hobbits, are already predisposed to stealthiness, so granting them invisibility on top of that makes sense and would tempt them to use the invisibility to do more morally ambiguous things and possibly eventually outright evil things. Isildur, being human, could/should have been granted a different power by the ring. Extreme combat prowess or something. Certainly overconfidence in that could just as easily have led to his death via the "betrayal" of the ring.

Yokay... I was just thinking about your call for upvotes and why I'm not going to upvote this. Which is fine, our tastes differ! I'm sure you haven't upvoted all my nerdy nerd hip hop music videos either.

If you search for Myers Briggs personality test, you'll find a lot.

I tried 2 of the first few search results, and this one:
http://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
was the best -- it matched what I got on a paper version of the test that I took while in school (INTP -- the "nerdy engineer" type).

This one:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
gave me a slightly different result (INTJ). The questions seemed repetitive and weird in that version, so I wouldn't recommend it except for comparing.

Yeah, I actually get quite a bit of novelty seeking attention here in Thailand, even as a nerdy white dude.

Where are you from?
Kansas.
Is that close to New York?
...No.