Author Archives: Billy

UBI Coin

A digital currency with built-in universal income, minimal energy requirements, and a bias towards equality. If you were designing a digital currency that could actually promote justice and equality, would would it look like? Here’s one approach. It is rather … Continue reading

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Minimalism: A Quilt Color Doodler

Try the doodler. Bahiyyih is making a quilt, and she was looking for someone to make a color sketch of her design. She said the word gradient, and had to do it. But I had to do it quickly because … Continue reading

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Belated Sigh

Publishing negative results helps everyone learn. Here’s my negative result: Instacart didn’t work out in the end. I had a great time there, but the combination of legacy code, a 3-hour timezone difference, and an on-site team of 200 programmers … Continue reading

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The Middle Class and a Peaceful Planet

Join the Middle Class. Have a life that’s good enough. This morning I was just sitting at my dining room table, playing Threes, when the concept of the Middle Class poked its elephant head in through a window and explained … Continue reading

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Macro-commuting

I plan to start working for Instacart, in San Francisco, in a couple of weeks — my first day will be September 10. I’ll still live in West Lafayette — for the first three weeks I plan to fly out Sunday night … Continue reading

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Produce

Teresa had an assignment to write a horror story recently for Language Arts. I don’t think I ever had that assignment, but it sounded like fun. On a Spring day it’s easy to get fresh strawberries. Every store has them, … Continue reading

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College Essay

Teresa, Bahiyyih, and I are helping Georgia in this season of college application essays. Taking turns with the words. This one is for a local institution: Dear Theodosia, When I first ate Purdue sandwiches, my brother told me they were … Continue reading

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Predicting childrens’ interests: I can’t do it, Yay!

Two of my daughters are watching Black-ish, a sitcom about “an upper-middle-class African-American family” [wikipedia]. I think the characters are trying to figure out their cultural identity. Last year I was excited to hear about it and looked for it … Continue reading

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Computer Science Class

Audio: Computer Science Class Today in Computer Science class, we did a demonstration of IFTTT, where we recorded something in SoundCloud, and IFTTT auto-published it on my blog. If I point my microphone at my children, would this recipe be … Continue reading

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Carbon Debt

We was just playing in the woods. Me and Sal had an old phone that didn’t have no minutes but still had good batteries and some stuff in it. We was just taking pictures of leaves and flowers and having … Continue reading

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