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the official blog of
Dave Tompkins

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Hey Western Alumni living in Vancouver... Rick McGhie is coming to town on June 5!!!

Recently, This technical publication (pdf) on publication record vs. alcohol consumption has been making the news. All I have to say is correlation does not imply causation -- However, I would like to take a moment and point out that it's been almost 14 years since I put out my own Unified Beer Theory of the Universe. Re-reading it now it would be nice to make it a bit more polished, but really, I have other publications to worry about. However, I do enjoy the fact that I'm currently the first hit when you google unified beer theory.

It's now been a year since I launched my movie rating website and started tracking my movie watching habits. Long story short: I watch too many movies. I actually just use the IMDb to rate my movies -- and I'm wondering if any other friends do too... because for my one year anniversary, I developed a really cool comparison tool that will let me compare my movie ratings to yours. If this applies to you, check it out and let me know.

This semester I've been TA-ing a first year course in Computer Science: Models of Computation and I had the opportunity to design a brand new lab for the course from scratch. It was quite fun and quite rewarding for me. I had to learn a bunch of JavaScript to make it work, and I was surprised how much client side JavaScript you can get away with. I would hope most of the lab would be accessible to a non-computer science audience, so feel free to give it a try (but be be forewarned that there are a few elements such as binary numbers that may seem foreign -- just ignore the description and look at the patterns). The challenge problem at the bottom may be difficult for even some of the geekier geeks out there. You can try it out here.