After being admitted to the University of Southern California, I began receiving quite a bit of mail from their various departments. The Viterbi School of Engineering, where I will be attending school next year, was the first to send me a USB key, which I promptly ignored. Assuming it was just a flash drive full of documents, I cast it aside like I had with almost every other piece of cardinal-and-gold paper that had arrived in my mailbox. Little did I know that the key was just the beginning of a vast conspiracy. What followed was the unraveling of a direct-mail tale of corruption and deceit, a story that exposed the seedy underbelly of USB-based correspondence.

Feedburner has been causing problems (not just for me!), and I’ve moved the site to a normal Atom feed with no analytics attached to it. You can resubscribe to the feed at its new location.

In our society, the term “stupid” carries with it a significant negative judgement, so much so that it is typically used as an insult. It is therefore not commonly considered that stupidity, and its cohort, ignorance, could actually bring with them a great increase of happiness. With no need to learn anything beyond the skills needed to survive, those who elect to remain in intellectual darkness are left with many years of unused life, life that could be spent falling in love, or serving a prison sentence. In contrast, those who feel that continued education is necessary spend many years of their limited lifespan learning, leaving precious little time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. We often observe that “simple pleasures” can be the most gratifying of all, and it cannot be denied that simple people experience more simple pleasures. In fact, many activities that may be negative for an educated person can be enjoyed by one who cares less for information; without any feelings of obligation toward societal progress, the ignorant can do as they please with limited guilt. Such ignorance inevitably leads to, as the tried-and-true idiom predicts, a state of bliss.

A couple days ago, I set to work on what seemed like a fairly straightforward project: I wanted to build a reasonably fast factorization program in plain C. I didn’t need it to be able to factor massive numbers, I just wanted to create it as an exercise. This seemingly basic concept led me into the strange world of number theory, a land I had never been formally introduced to, and ultimately resulted in me gaining quite a bit of knowledge.

I’ve written a lot in the past about the various systems that have powered this blog. It’s gotten to the point now where the most popular topic on this site seems to be the site itself. However, I’ve made a major change to how it all works, and I think that it is important enough this time to justify yet another meta-post.