From today’s New York Times: “eBay is finally acknowledging that it paid too much for the Internet phone company Skype two years ago.”

In case you’re out of the loop, Skype is an internet telephony program which allows free calls between computers, and very cheap calls out of or into computers from real landlines. Two years ago, eBay acquired Skype for a whopping $2.6 billion, leading me–and everyone else–to ask, “Why would eBay, an internet auction site at heart, pay so much for a rapidly-expanding internet-based telephony service?”

My only answer was that eBay was viewing Skype in much the same way as dot-coms were viewed before the bubble burst: as a high-traffic site which could somehow, in some mysterious way, be able to generate huge revenues. Don’t get me wrong. High-traffic sites with useful services are valuable assets. Google makes its money from being a high-traffic site. But I failed to see the usefulness of Skype in diversifying eBay’s holdings. When eBay purchased PayPal back in the day, the acquisition made perfect sense, and paid in spades. But how could Skype be incorporated into eBay as PayPal was? Or even if they remained entirely separate, how could Skype actually generate revenue for eBay?

The answer is that it couldn’t. In 2007 Q2, Skype earned a paltry $90 million, and yesterday, eBay announced it was making a $1.43 billion payout to Skype in accordance with their prior agreement. According to Aaron Kessler, “a senior Internet analyst,” eBay’s problem was that “‘They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.’” I feel like that’s what I said two years ago.

Perhaps I should add “junior Internet analyst” to my business cards.

Today, the New York Times ended their online TimesSelect subscription service, which offered online access to the Times archives. TimesSelect was available to all subscribers to the physical paper, as well as many university students and any individuals willing to pay $50 a year for the service.

Nowadays, a great deal of the material on the Internet is available for free. Revenues are largely raised through online advertising, itself a business so large that it funds much of Google’s activities. In fact, newspaper websites are perhaps the largest destinations at which users have to pay for information online. (And pornography, which has always been a burgeoning business in virtually every medium.)

As I see it, the reluctance of newspaper websites to rely on advertising is primarily twofold. While newspapers have always relied on print advertising to keep themselves afloat, they view the Internet as an extension of their print business, not necessarily as a new market in and of itself. (To wit: online-only news sources tend not to require subscriptions.) Print sources see their websites as a great opportunity to take advantage of the technology available and provide extensive archives. Since those who browse archives are probably hardcore enough to be willing to pay, why not charge for the service?

The other reason is that newspapers cost a lot to run, and subscriptions generate a better, more stable source of revenue than online advertising, especially for upscale outfits such as the Times which would be averse to “Shoot the Gangsta” type ads. Indeed, the Times was making over $10 million a year through TimesSelect. So why drop it, and so soon after it was introduced in 2005?

A major part of it is the growing importance of search engines. By opening their articles to all users, they are also opening those pages to search engines like Google, which can index them and attract more readers to the Times online. More readers, in turn, attract more ad revenue.

Transitioning from the walled garden to the open model of the Internet is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that print media has been reluctant to accept. Such a bold move by one of the most respected print news agencies in the world is certainly something worth noticing.

This is perhaps the funniest thing I have ever seen. This is a real album cover.

I taped the picture on the outside of my door. It was epic.

It feels weird to know that I’m leaving in less than two days. I mean, I’m mostly packed already–except for things like my laptop, which I wouldn’t want to be without for two whole boring summer days–but it hasn’t quite hit me yet that I’m actually leaving.

Those of you who know me well know that I’ve had very dysfunctional circumstances thus far in my life. I hope to close that chapter of my life and begin a new one with my departure, a much freer and happier one. It’s hard to leave a life behind, but I feel I must do that as much as I am able. My own insecurities and those imposed on me, all the negativity and restriction I have faced: I want to get away from it all, and start fresh. Start wiser, but fresh.

(Now might be a good time to mention publicly that when I return to the North Shore, I will be staying at Margaret’s house.)

I have long felt an independent person, but the worst kind of independence is one forced prematurely. I have grown up emotionally too fast, in awkward fits and starts; perhaps now I will be able to finish proper as I begin a new journey.

Things like the Koide formula make me kinda happy. It’s exciting that we have already developed frameworks to understand so many things, but that so much still remains. We clearly know very little about the universe.

A show of brute computation doesn’t interests me nearly as much as an elegant result. If I had to define elegance in this context, I think I would say that a subject with a high results to complexity ratio is very elegant, especially for math. I think first-year calculus (I and II) is very elegant, as it makes many very difficult problems easy, and makes insoluble problems possible.

To me, the most elegant result obtained by first-year calculus is Euler’s formula, or in its most famous special case, that e^(i*pi) = -1. The fact that this can be conclusively proved to or even discovered by high-schoolers with knowledge of Taylor series is, I think, a testament of how elegant calculus is. Of course, there are other ways to prove it, but I think Taylor series are the most elegant way–the clearest, most straightforward, least contrived; no clever logic is required at all.

Of course, Euler’s many formulae remain the gold standard of elegant results in mathematics. While he didn’t always convincingly prove his results, I think it was more important that he simply generated them. Sometimes simpler logic goes further than more bulletproof logic. I certainly don’t believe I should be mentioned in the same paragraph as Euler, but as to myself, I was quite happy with my intuitive proof using Gram-Schmidt that, for vector space V and subspace W, that dim(W) + dim(W perp) = dim(V). The idea is too conceptual to forge into any sort of formal proof, but it makes perfect sense; I would be interested in seeing a more rigorous proof, but I haven’t gone out of my way to look for one. I am, for the most part, satisfied with rationality.

Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem was certainly a tour de force in the mathematical world, and certainly, as I understand, contains many interesting ideas (which no, I am not myself qualified to appreciate). It’s certainly nice that the theorem–and subsequently, the full Shimura-Taniyama theorem–have been proven, but the proofs are long, complex, involved, and *gasp* even, in some places, significantly case-oriented. It’s a true achievement, but to me isn’t as awesome (in the pre-slang sense of the word) as much shorter results. The epsilon conjecture hinted at great possibilities, but to me, V – E + F = 2 has for centuries been quite profound enough.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t consider the above to be true accomplishments; they certainly are. I suppose it’s simply that I am more interested in the concept than the execution itself. This is why I doubt I will be entering math itself as a field, though I fully expect to be using math in whatever I end up doing.

And it’s also, I suppose, why I have always been so happy to help somebody with math who seems actually interested in the ideas themselves, not just how to do well on the next test. It’s easy to tell the students who truly want to hear the concepts and understand them for themselves apart from the students who simply want an algorithm to memorize. And it’s perfectly understandable why math could be so hated by students who view it as simply a set of algorithms. Because then, as John once sagely pointed out, math is no more than a “demented mind-game.”

So the other day I was making a cup of tea, and asked my sister whether she would like some as well. Since I didn’t mind leaving the teabag in my own cup while I drank it, I realized that the easiest way to make two cups of tea of approximately the same strength would be to first put the teabag in her cup, and then to move it to my cup for the remainder of the time. This is because the teabag lets flavor out the fastest at the beginning, and gets increasingly slow at it as time progresses. Of course the tea flavor always increases; there’s no point at which the teabag starts reclaiming flavor for itself.

With all these words like “increases” and “increasingly slow” this sounds like a good opportunity for some calculus.

The graph above represents f(t), the derivative of tea flavor with respect to time. Note that df/dt (which will now be referred to as Tea/Time) is always positive, but decreases in value approaching zero as time approaches infinity. The strength of the tea–denoted F(t)–is the definite integral of this graph over some time interval.

Let’s make some assumptions to make this problem easier. Since I occasionally forget about my tea as I let it cool down before drinking, let’s assume that I don’t start drinking my tea until time t=infinity. Thus, the strength of her tea is equal to the integral from zero to whatever time I remove the teabag (called t=a), and the strength of my tea is equal to the tail integral from a to infinity.

We can of course solve for a algebraically:

Of course, this simply verifies our original observation that I want to remove the teabag at the point at which her tea is half as strong as the teabag would be if I waited until time infinity before removing the teabag from a single cup. We are, however, happy to see our integrals come out to a statement we already knew to be true.

–

I guess what I’m asking is, “Is it a bad thing that I started forming integrals in my head when my sister said she wanted tea?”

For posterity and any interested parties, here is what I have installed on my computer so far, and perhaps some rationale behind each choice. Time to open up Add or Remove Programs and see what’s there… (I’m skipping preinstalled drivers, etc.)

7-Zip: It’s the best compression software I have found so far, works with practically every format, is free, and goes a LOT faster than Windows’ built-in shell decompression.

ActivePerl: I program in Perl. I need a copy of Perl.

Adobe Flash Player 9: I use the Internet. ‘Nuff said.

CutePDF Writer: Virtual PDF printers are really nice. They’re good when you don’t want a physical copy of something, but you need to capture a program’s output for some reason or another. Good for saving things for digital posterity.

Foxit Reader: I’ve mentioned this on my blog before. The best PDF software I’ve used. Vastly superior to Adobe Reader: it’s fast, small, and loads instantly.

Frets on Fire: A free Guitar Hero clone for computer. I need to improve my skillz so I can take on Nick.

Launchy: Great software that Jonah introduced me to. I can access any program or song on my computer (or more: it’s fully customizable) by hitting Ctrl+Space, typing in a few letters of its name, and hitting Enter. It’s really easy, and makes the Start Menu practically obsolete.

MS Office Enterprise 2007: I was warned against Office 2007, but decided to try it out anyway. (The first non-free software on this list, it’s actually a legal copy! IU has a group licensing agreement or something; I could download it right from their website.) I rather like Office 2007. The interface is drastically changed (no menus! just buttons!) but they did a great job of maintaining keyboard shortcuts. Beware, though, they have changed their default file format. Save in compatibility mode if you want people using Office 97-2003 to be able to read your files without a plugin. Oh, also, I rather like OneNote as an organization tool for all my random notes-to-self and data. But more on that some other time.

Mozilla Firefox: Because I use the Internet, and IE is terrible. I upgraded to IE 7, which I do think is a big step up from IE 6, but I still love me some Firefox. Plus, I get to use my favorite extensions, like BugMeNot and FireFTP. I haven’t installed my gesture extension, because I still don’t have a notebook mouse, so I’m only using the touchpad and clit mouse (not my term, xkcd’s).

Mp3tag: While I kinda prefer Winamp for actually changing tags, Mp3tag is a small program that’s good at what I use it for, which is primarily mass-renaming mp3 files to conform to their tags.

Pidgin: Because Pidgin (the IM client formerly known as Gaim) is the best IM client I’ve used. It’s full of features, but still manages to feel pretty slim and easy to use.

QuickTime: See “Adobe Flash Player.”

Ruckus Player: At orientation, they suggested that we use our free subscriptions to Ruckus to download music. It has a library most the size of iTunes’s (but not as big…) and downloads songs right to your computer. The downside is that it downloads WMAs with DRM on them. However, there are programs that can strip PlaysForSure DRM from WMA files. I mean, err, I didn’t say anything!

SciTE: I don’t like programming in big IDEs, but for things like Perl, I like having some basic syntax highlighting to catch silly mistakes. SciTE is a really small free lexing engine with a pretty good interface for editing scripts. Perl highlighting is built in, as are most languages anybody uses, and even a few they don’t. SciTE is the best syntax highlighter I’ve come across, and I’m sticking with it.

Steam/HL1 Anthology: Because I want to keep my copies of Half Life, Half Life: Blue Shift, and Half Life: Opposing Force. Steam ain’t that bad, really, and I did get a (legal!) copy of the HL1 Anthology for $5.

Winamp: Because it’s the best music player I’ve found. I like its library management, and I can’t live without global shortcuts.

Well, there you have it, folks! Top software that Carlo needs for maximizing productivity! (OK, maybe HL1 isn’t for “maximizing productivity,” but most of it is!) Plus, it shows you don’t need to pirate software to have lots of great software for free! The only non-free things on that list are Office and Half Life, and I have legitimate copies of both. If you see anything on the list above that sounds interesting, I encourage you to check it out; everything there is really great software, and vastly superior to the usual substitutes (Pidgin over AIM, Firefox over IE, Foxit over Adobe). So enjoy, and until next time, keep on softwarin’!

I didn’t keep as good a record as yesterday, and the day was a lot shorter, so I’ll be pretty terse.

Nick was going to pick me up at 7:10 this morning. I woke up at 7:15, and was out the door at 7:20, though I wasn’t really particularly awake. I bought a bagel and coffee at the overpriced hotel eatery. Then I refilled the coffee and drank it again. 32 ounces of coffee and vigorous walking helped me regain alertness, though I didn’t perform all that well regardless. Same as last year, actually; I was substantially worse on Sunday both years.

We were seeded fifth after yesterday, which we were really happy about. (Two teams went 9-1. As you recall, we went 8-2.) Maybe we could have placed higher had we not let ourselves get raped by State College A. Oh well, fifth in such a strong field is certainly an accomplishment. As we walked to our first match, I remarked, “This is a change. Now we’re the giants; everyone’s out to get us.”

The format was double-elimination. Placing depended on how many rounds you played until being eliminated, unless you were in the top four, in which case it got more complicated later to determine third place and the championship.

Round 1: New Trier 325 – Arcadia A 60

Round 2: New Trier 390 – Georgetown Day 230

Round 3: Walt Whitman 300 – New Trier 185

Round 4: New Trier 295 – Chattahoochee 220

Round 5: Troy 345 – New Trier 265

We tied for 13th place with seven other teams. That’s better than we’ve ever done at NAQT Nationals, and in the largest and hardest field yet. We’re happy.

Besides, we have PACE Nationals at Ann Arbor in two weeks, and I’m traveling with Team Illinois to the PAC national tournament in Orlando a bit after. PACE has a smaller field than NAQT, but all the elite teams will be there. It will be scary.

Ah, quizbowl. An intense mental activity against the best teams in the nation, with some of the brightest, most knowledgeable, most…interesting high-schoolers. A few quotes of the day follow, without comment.

“Damn, that’s good bread.”

“I was minister of her interior all night!” (after hearing that Sarkozy was previously minister of the interior)

“Wait, I said, ‘Grab Robert’s nutsack’?” (Nick asked confusedly)

“My whole life’s an Irish jig; is that a crime?”

“Eat this, toll man!” (to the guy manning the hotel’s toll booth)

“What has a hardness of 4400?”
“That’s what she asked!”

“Do you think I could beat Yao Ming if I had an axe?”

—

Oh yeah, we had a tournament too.

Our first match was against Novi A (Novi, MI), a team about which we’ve heard a lot of very good things; we were a bit worried before we started, but we beat them fairly comfortably. Our second match was against James Island Charter (Charleston, SC), and it was an extremely close match that we won by only 10 points.

We then had a bye, our first of four, and saw Maine South with a bye of their own.

Our third match was against Minnetonka A (Minnetonka, MN). As the tournament was power matched, every match was against a team with an equal record, so each match should theoretically get harder and harder. As we just barely won our 1-0 match, we were afraid about our 2-0 match, but beat Minnetonka soundly.

We then had another bye, seeing Maine South yet again as we hung around doing nothing. Our fourth match was against Wilmington Charter A (Wilmington, DE), and at one point we had a lead of about 250 points. We ended up squandering this lead terribly and losing by five points, which was a huge disappointment as we headed to lunch. Oh well, we were 3-1.

After lunch (at McDonald’s, as Reinstein almost ran into about five other cars, again…) we played East Lansing A (East Lansing, MI) and beat them by about 100 points, to become 4-1. We also won our next match against Garfield Heights (Garfield Heights, OH), and then we had another bye to relax.

To advance to Sunday’s playoff rounds, we had to go at least 6-4. We were 5-1 by this point, so we were mainly trying to win as many as possible, instead of being concerned about simply making it to the next day. (Record and points scored helps determine seed going into the playoffs.)

Our next match was against the 5-1 Livingston (Livingston, NJ), who we figured would be very good. They weren’t bad, but we beat them by 340 points, which surprised even us.

Our next round was our fourth and last bye. We were 6-1 at this point, so we were guaranteed to make it into the playoffs. It was all gravy from this point…

So we had some serious deliberations and agreed to split an onion pizza. We got it just before the next match began, so Robert and I were busy inhaling a slice each before the match began. And it was against…Eden Prairie A (Eden Prairie, MN). They were one of the most talked-about teams before Nationals, because they had very impressive stats throughout their season, but only against Minnesota teams. Basically, everyone knew they were very good, but had no idea how very good. (There’s a huge difference between “very good” and “very, very good.”) We ended up beating them by a fair margin, and then we were 7-1. (They were 6-2 after that match, and ended up going 8-2.)

We walked into our next room, and after us came Richard Montgomery A (Rockville, MD). Now, Richard Montgomery was national champion last year, so we were…very concerned. Nick and I know how good they are, so we were kind of afraid. Fortunately, this round was my round to shine, as I got 100 points in tossups (3 powers, 6 regular, 1 decent neg). With one tossup left to go, they were 45 down, which meant that they could tie it. Luckily, they negged on it, so we won by 50 points.

Woo! We beat last year’s national champions by 50 points! (They are still a very, very good team this year. It was a very close match.) We were 8-1! None of us thought we’d ever be 8-1 at Nationals with such good competition. We had beaten big name after big name; we were already well-known, but we were making a bigger name of ourselves after that. (Besides that, we had card #2 and were playing card #1 next.)

And our last match was against State College A (State College, PA). This room was the one in which the podcasts were taking place, so our voices would be recorded for all eternity, for quizbowlers across the country to listen to our match. This was huge. We would be first or second seed if we won.

So naturally, we started slow, and only got slower. State College was doing fairly well, but we were terrible. Neg after neg…losing buzzer race after buzzer race…it was pretty humiliating at the half.

And then it just got worse, as they started playing extremely well. Our tiny chance diminished into no chance at all as they kept powering tossups very early, and we sat there helpless. They ended up beating us by about 400 points, as we scored only 50. Needless to say, this hurt our points per game significantly. Instead of being second place, we fell quite a bit by losing and scoring only 50.

Oh well, we’re still way up there, and everything changes very quickly on Sunday; we’re still seeded highly for tomorrow. It’s double-elimination, so we just have to win as many as we can without losing twice…some of our matches will surely be against teams we have already faced. Hopefully we won’t see State College A early.

—

New Trier: 8-2

Carlo, 435 points, 10.0 GP
Nick, 370 points, 10.0 GP
Ben, 320 points, 10.0 GP
Robert, 95 points, 8.5? GP
Jonah, 15 points, 1.5? GP

Look, guys. I don’t get it. I know standardized testing is flawed. I know it’s hard–nay, impossible–to truly measure the aptitude or knowledge of students nationwide through a mere set of questions. I’m not arguing about the relative merits of testing. What I want to know is why…why students must make such a big deal out of it.

I don’t really think that standardized testing is so awful, except that anxious students and parents have made it that way. I mean, how else are schools supposed to determine at a glance how qualified students are? I don’t think they should ever be used in and of themselves, but so far as I can tell from the people I know, they do a fairly good job of telling the brightest students apart from the bright, from the average, from the below average. It’s a pretty good idea, and if such exams are well-executed, I’d bet they do a lot more good than harm.

But with the inception of a “test-prep” industry dedicated to preparing students to do “well” (read: “better than they should”) on such exams, all bets are off. For starters, I think the entire idea is stupid and unhelpful, especially on tests that aren’t very content-oriented, such as the SAT and ACT. All you need to do beforehand is take one practice test so you’re used to the format and style of the questions.

Instead, these books purport to teach how to beat the test, strategies for guessing questions, etc. Honestly, if you want to learn to do that, you need to sit back and think about things. Do you have better things to do with your time other than waste it on perversions like studying for the SAT?

But those people are perhaps beyond help; what really sparked this was all those who inordinately freak out before and during AP tests. During Spanish and English, I have sat near girls who have had crises filling out the bubbles with their names and such. (Oh no, I signed my name in pen!!?!) Honestly, relax. And during AP test weeks, too. I don’t really mind the tests; they’re meant to test how much I know, and I think I know enough to get the scores I need. I review anything I deem necessary, but other than that, I don’t worry about it. If you want a 5, just sit back and think, “Will I do better than 80% of test-takers?” If you want a 4, will you do better than 60%? (Yes, it varies by test, but you get my point.) I mean, that’s all you really need to do. This is especially true at New Trier, where the AP classes tend to be much harder than the tests.

So calm down. They’re just…tests.