Omri Schwarz's Links

Personal Links

• There's Tau Epsilon Phi. I used to live there in my undergrad days at MIT. It was great. It's hard at this point to fill in the details of life there. Using the central stairwell to rediscover the joys of gravity again and again and again. Sitting on the hanging couch to flame about things with the folks below. Standing on the net to demonstrate concepts in 18.02. Pardon me while I drool. I'll add my own stories one day. I lived with this guy for a year, Here are his stories. I also lived with this one for a year, and with this freak of nature for two years, as well as this one. Here's another friend of mine. Wanka's pages also reflect life there well. As do Sawyer's. Since I've left, other folks live in the house.
• There's SIPB. I hack there. I went through the 18 hour plus hacking binges finishing the C to English translator there. As much as I hate to admit it, more of what I do at work I learned in the SIPB office than in class at MIT. SIPB's a student club supported by MIT in order to grease the wheels of MIT's computing infrastructure. It runs one of the Web's earliest servers. A random assortment of SIPB folks have their home pages up. Some of these predate the index.html convention.
• MIT's Lecture Series Committee. I used to do stuff with them. I still go to the movies and lectures. They brought Douglas Adams to MIT. 'nuff said.
• The MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players have me on hand for emergencies. The rest of the time there's MITSFS.
• Back in the good old days when the Web was a neat new toy, all my friends used it as an outlet for their narcissism. Like me. Then they stopped. So they're 404. For now. I'll find every last one of them.
• For institutional links, there's the Los Alamos National Laboratory, my current haunt.

Pretentious Intellectual Links

• The Arts and Letters Daily is a web log (sans comments) for highbrow reading.
• Bruce Sterling's Viridian movement seeks to create art based on an esthetic motivated by global warming. I'm not enough of an artiste to add much to it, but as you can see it is partly responsible for the general design of my pages, the color scheme in particular.
• The line between intellectual and anti-intellectual is thin, thanks to the Chattering Class's love of postmodernist silliness. The Vocabula Review, with its much needed advocacy of prescriptivist pedantry, is at the far end of the inevitable backlash. It's just as pretentious, but not as irritating. Yes, I can talk like that in real life, but I usually don't.
• To answer our society's pretenses, there are several sites with pretenses of their own. Suck.com and McSweeney's deserve links on those grounds, as does The Onion.

Miscelaneous Topical Links

• Like most bleating edge digerati, I get my news from web logs. Kuro5hin has my rants and is largely my favorite. Slashdot has gotten a tad too top heavy. Newsforge is a good place to look as well. For more skeptical and more independent reporting, Need to Know and The Register are a must, as is Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater Digest.
• For static reference information, the Open Directory Project is your friend. An experiment in book writing is taking place at Andamooka. A new encyclopedia project, minus intellectual property licensing headaches of any sort, is springing up at Nupedia. I hope to do stuff for them in my spare time for the sake of being among the new Encyclopedists. While Nupedia produces new content, Project Gutenberg is helping to make old books available as their copyrights expire. The Online Book Initiative is also participating. For a good reference listing of dead trees, there's Canonical Tomes.

Network Detritus

• Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass is the physics lab report all of us want to write.
• Go scriosa an Cat Mara do chuid infheistíochtaí!