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There was a heat wave in the Bay Area a few weeks ago, and lacking air conditioning, I turned on a ceiling fan. The blades slowly started spinning clockwise, but it was a hot day, so I adjusted the fan to the highest setting. As the blades started to speed up, they eventually appeared to…
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My Cuisinart ice cream maker had arrived only a few days before the e-mail did. I did a double-take when I saw the subject line: trying to track down Nathan Kurz Nathan Kurz? The Nathan Kurz? The Nathan Kurz of Scream sorbet? Yes, that one. The e-mail was from Charlotte Druckman, the reporter who had written about Scream for the New…
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My unhealthy obsession with Scream Sorbet began at the Grand Lake Farmers’ Market in Oakland, where after a run around Lake Merritt in late 2010, I rewarded myself with a scoop of Nathan Kurz’s pistachio sorbet. While I’m a fan of ice cream and pistachios separately, pistachio ice cream is far from my favorite, but…
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The idea of learning by translating is well known to anyone who has tried Duolingo, but I rediscovered it in a new context recently. I had planned to take piano lessons this fall at the SF Community Music Center but returned from vacation to discover that I’d missed the registration deadline. When I mentioned this…
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[Earlier installments of The Bug] Now that I knew about the bug, the next thing to do was tell my advisor. It had been just a few weeks since he said to a luminary visiting campus, “One of my students generalized the entropy power inequality,” to which the luminary replied, “That’s impressive!” What had led me to smile then felt embarrassing now. Had the news spread elsewhere?…
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As I read through “Information theoretic inequalities”, it felt like the icing on the cake: a simpler proof of a result from my Master’s thesis. The result itself wasn’t the focus of my Master’s but instead facilitated the proof of a number of other results, so following a writeup of the initial proof and a sanity check by my advisor, I had…
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Over dinner recently, a friend mentioned that when he is unfamiliar with a topic, he tends to accept what he reads on that topic at face value. The remark sparked some thoughts I’ve been having about how the way in which information is presented can affect how people interpret it, so I shared one example…
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Jim mentioned Puzzled Pint a few months ago, but it conflicted with an improv rehearsal. However, this month, we decided to make Puzzled Pint our troupe’s social outing. The first step in Puzzled Pint is to figure out where the event will be held. To do this, one solves a location puzzle. In our case,…
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While waiting to do an improv set, Chrysteena told me that she and Jim had three cartons: one with apples, one with oranges, and a third with apples and oranges. Unfortunately, each carton was mislabeled, and they wanted to move the labels to the correct cartons. What is the minimum number of pieces of fruit…
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“What made you decide to go to graduate school?” During a workshop about academic careers at Allerton in 2008, Roy Yates responded to the above question in one of my favorite responses to a question of this type: “It was the most socially acceptable way to procrastinate what I wanted to do with the rest…
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Krish Eswaran 