Informatonauts

Nikhil runs for knowledge. IBM studies people. Study shows Spritz is terrible for comprehension, (but good for forgetting things, we think). Mapreduce uses a mafia structure (masters, mappers, groupers, reducers). A fondness for BASIC and variables named A1. You don’t need to learn to program. Yes, really. Nick mixes all the metaphors, in a pool.

[Originally Recorded on 5-2-14]

Nick and Nikhil are off the ‘joe. Wood tables and hammers defeat little children. The Universe is not a toy, is something you learn in college. You don’t need to learn to code. College is worth more than $100K. APIs are in again (and so is Github)!

Nick is homesick and Nikhil is living the brunch life. Is reading books still a thing? Some models are useful, and Nick has the flu. Cockroaches are smarter than computers and may be older than the Universe. If XKCD doesn’t cut it, make your own. But if you do, your an idiot. Join us as Nick and Nikhil browse the internets.

Smartest company in the world? Try Illumina (and Apple is nowhere to be found). Walmart Rises! Oculus VR and Father Putin, breaking all the rules! Amazon Smile is a great idea. Reminiscing about Windows XP (Goodbye old friend, we’ll miss your bubbly blueness). Nick rants on healthcare and ethics. Nikhil recounts how a hospitals screw peoples’ credit. Kickstarter is now a pre-startup incubator. Nikhil and Nick play with Wolfram alpha (and inflation between 2008 and now is 11% suckas). Amazon is for (book) lovers.

Nikhil can’t buy the XBox One. Nick and Nikhil talk workspaces. No one works from home. Microsoft might not be cool, but that’s why REAL hipsters use it. Nikhil works on D3 stuff and Nick tries to be productive. Facebook releases its own language, Hack. Vinyl records may be better than Spotify--but probably not. Oh yeah, a banana has 105 calories. And men may have menopause.

Nikhil can’t wait for his very own titan. Nick laments his lack of true nerdery. Whippersnappers actually install toolbars. Indie developers are just as cool as indie bands. Nikhil’s not making money fast enough, but the city’s still paying for it. The last piece of Nick’s childhood is dead in the snow. And we both try to predict the future, but we’re not engineers.

The unbeatable 2048. Umbrellas are for tourists (and Canadians). Against the Startups of the Age. Nikhil pulled the Chemex trigger. How blade grinders are like fruit ninjas. Some fish for your bash scripts. All your Arscoins are belongs to Nick. And he lost a lot of money doing so. Vim harder, Vim smarter.

HIMSS is an acronym for a reason. Better health and more painful feet can be as cheap as $25. Relive Jurassic Park on the internetz. Nick and Nikhil develop a coffee tasting experiment. S/MIME is awesome, cryptography is moot, and Google Keep is what Evernote wishes it could be when it grows up (and it works with GTD)!

Nikhil is now obsessed with Neo4J and other graphing databases, Java is the bane of our existence, Stephen Few and Edward Tufte know that practice makes pretty. Update on 3D printed glasses, so hip that hipsters aren’t even doing it yet. Princeton shoehorns Facebook into a disease model, and Nikhil might be a teenager because he uses Snapchat and Instagram.

Preparing for the apocalypse with your own 3D printed glasses, Nikhil thinks PPTs are weak sauce, Hemingway app can help make your crappy writing a little less crappy, Flappy Bird iPhones are $1000 on eBay, and Nick and Nikhil berate every company in the mobile phone space because they are conceited academics who live in a bubble and think they can do better.