Who am I?
Stuff I've Written
Course-related
Colonizing the Colonizer? Maghrebis in France today, four decades after the end of the empire.
From State to Nation: Egypt and the enduring impacts of state structure and imperialism.
The Cold War University: Engineering Consensus in Cold War America.
Wild Thorns: Living between the Impossible and the Absurd (book review) in post-1967 Palestine.
Appropriating Tragedy: The Ideological Uses of Catastrophe, from the Holocaust to the Nakba.
Not Cultural, Not a Revolution: What Mao's Cultural Revolution was and wasn't.
Crafting Jewish Identity: the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jews of Muslim Lands.
Six Days War: Transforming the Modern Middle East.
The English Levellers: Between Evolution and Revolution.
Other
Versailles, 1919: How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Death Penalty: Further proof that logic is not most politicians' strong suit.
Dear Graduate... My advice to the HMB High School class of 2002 (my class).
Our wonderful world
If you're of the school of thought that believes it's better to be badly informed, than not informed at all, our wonderful media stands ready to assist you. And if you don't like what you read, you can always pretend it's just fiction. Most of the time, you'll be right.
If you can still hear the words 'fair and balanced' without cracking up, I have some prime real-estate in southern Manhattan to sell you, at a very reasonable price. Otherwise the wit and wisdom of the 'loony left' and 'paleoncon right' awaits your viewing pleasure. Let's leave the impartial analysis to Judy Miller please.
College, it's what's for dinner
Go to class, or don't go to class, it's all the same to most people. But then again, I'd rather leave quantum chem to those better suited to it. Which means the difference between classroom 320-40 and 40-320 is actually quite substantial. So hooray for scheduling!
Leaving the 5-year plans to Uncle Joe, I'll stick to 4 year schemes for now. Planning is a great alternative to actually getting things done. A penchant for overoptimistic projection might also be my ticket to wealth, fame, and a cubicle in the Congressional Budget Office. We can all dream, can't we?
Killing time and Learning things
Books and Music Literacy good. Music good. Literacy and music good.
Words of wit and wisdom. Life's big lessons can't always be boiled down to a twenty word phrase. But it doesn't hurt to try.
Computers
pi_css5 is a program for calculating π (another obsession of mine). It serves as a benchmark of different hardware, and also different software/languages.
I've also created a listing of other π programs, and a comparison of the better ones on Linux and Windows.
MacOS X Applications. A computer that solves more problems than it causes? Yup, Apple's got a winner. But it's the apps that make the system.
Speed up MacOSX compilation. Use distcc to make fink and other OS X builds bearable (only works for 10.3 at the moment).
Silly screenshots. Oh the things you can do with emulators and other programs.
π (pi)
π used to be an obsession of mine. Or rather a memory exercise, since I managed to memorize 585 digits somewhere along the line in 7th grade.
10,000 digits of π. What can you use it for? Not much, but if you really want a memory challenge...
History of π computation is long and glorious one. Irrationality does not come easily.
