Ole Bakstad's blog

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I just found a really fascinating documentary about Chris Michael Langan. He has an IQ between 190 and 210, had a very bad childhood, works in a bar and has many interesting views on the world we live in. Particularly the part where he talk about his experience with the school system is interesting. As he says in the documentary:

I found the whole experience of school to be highly annoying. I think I could wrapped the whole thing up in a couples of years. Instead they managed to keep me around for twelve. [...] My teachers just didn’t particularly care for me.

I totally agree with him. We have to realize that smart people need special attention. They should be inspired to learn more about fields they find interesting, and maybe one day make a breakthrough in their field or fields. We need more people like Newton, Einstein, Euler and so on.

The school system in Norway takes care of the people who are less fortunate than the average person, but they don’t seem to care about people who are more fortunate, i.e. people with high IQ. The politicians should really sit down and do some drastic changes to the school system. We need to get back to the basics of learning and get rid of all the pedagogical bullshit that’s being suggested.

See the documentary on YouTube:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Mats has written a great post on the difference between being inspired by and outright copying. The two Norwegian geniuses Magnus Andersen and Thomas Skorpen has created this amazing new website for keeping you’re friends and family updated with that you’re doing. This revolutionary can be found at qpsa.no (Norwegian language).

Disappointed? So am I. The page is, like mats says, a outright copy of twitter (with a crappier design). Magnus and Thomas, you should be ashamed.

Read Mats’ post to see how non-revolutionary qpsa really is.

I just found this amazing clip with the wonder child Dmitri Gaskin. He’s twelve years old, contributes to dupral, involved in the google summer of code and attending 6th grade classes! This is something you don’t see everyday. He talks a bit fast, but that’s just because he’s nervous. Anyways, a twelve year old kid on Google Tech Talks is damn impressive!

I just realized how powerful jQuery library is, and I will definitely start using it.

See the clip on YouTube:

Wish I was that smart when I were twelve years old :-|.

I’m logging in to the blog’s admin panel and I see this:

For a second I thought “Am I really THAT popular?!”, but of course, I’m not :-(. It turns out that I’ve been hit by spam bots (again).

Luckily for me word-press already got a plug-in to handle spam called akismet, you just have to activate it.

To do this you have to register an account at wordpress.com to get a API-key. I know I have an account there, but I couldn’t remember my password. You might think the “lost password”-function would fix the problem, but it didn’t. I got the “warning” mail with a site to visit if I wanted to reset my password. I pressed the link and a message tells me to wait for an email with my new password. After two days of waiting I decided to try again, but with the same result. Since the something obviously wasn’t the way it should be I had to register a new account to finally get my API-key and activate aksimet.

If aksimet keeps Mr. spambot away I would say that all the trouble was worth it.

I got a nice comment from “car insurance quotes” here the other day. Apparently he enjoyed my post on
LaTeX in WP so much that he decided to post a comment.

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Thanks for the comment “car insurance quotes”, I couldn’t agree more!

So I’m over at Mats‘ blog reading about “123-meming with Christer”. You’re probably asking; “What the hell is 123-meming?”. The every same question did I ask myself while reading his post. It turns out that 123-meming is the following:

1. Pick up the book closest to you
2. Open page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence…
4. …and publish the next three sentences
5. Link to 5 other bloggers and tell who linked you

So here we go! The  book closest to me was “Elementary Linear Algebra” by C. H. Edwards, Jr. and David E. Penny (why is this the book closest to me, shouldn’t I be reading physics?). The chapter is named “Vectors in the Plane and in Space”. Here are the three sentences:

Thus every vector is a linear combination of the two vectors i and j. Such linear combinations of vectors may be manipulated exactly like combinations of real numbers. For instance, if

a = a₁i+a₂j and b = b₁i +b₂j

then

a + b = (a₁i+a₂j) + (b₁i +b₂j)
= (a₁ + a₂)i + (b₁ + b₂)j

and

ca = c(a₁i+a₂j)
= (ca₁)i + (ca₂)j.

Thank you, Mats, for handing the meme over to me! It just took about 15 minutes to write the damn equations in wordpress!

Since the only other person in my blogroll is Øyvind i leave it up to him to carry this meme on!

Again, thank you Mats!