Nerd Wisdom

I’ve had zero interest in the whole social-networking craze, and was wondering what people saw in it (my one or two visits to MySpace left me seriously underwhelmed), but a strange convergence of events made me reconsider. First, I read this post about Facebook at the excellent blog (run by seven theoretical particle physicists and/or astrophysicists) Cosmic Variance. Secondly, my cousin Yoav Freund, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego, invited me, at the moment after I finished reading the Cosmic Variance post, to become his “friend” at Facebook.

Well, I figured there’s no harm in joining up and testing it out. Anyways, I’m sure it’s no news to the young’uns out there, but Facebook is a very slick and well-designed piece of software. It’s free and easy to join. And the look of the web-site is impressively professional and clean.

The basic idea seems to be that you link up with friends who you know or knew from school or work or some other way, and learn about what they’re interested in. Since it’s a lazy Saturday, I’ve been playing with that all day, while watching the Red Sox beat up on the Yankees, and it is surprisingly fun.

(One thing I suggest is to set your account so that it doesn’t email you every time one of your friends does something, or you’ll soon be filling up your mailbox. It also should go without saying that you should carefully review your privacy settings so that they are set the way you want them; though I didn’t find any problems with dealing with that.)

But besides catching up with and communicating with friends, there’s many other things that you can do, and one of the most interesting is to form a “group” for people of similar interests. And since all the cool bloggers are apparently making Facebook groups for their blogs, I figured I’d do the same.

So you can now join the Nerd Wisdom Facebook Group!

The Nerd Wisdom Facebook group will be wide open to whatever people want to post about or link to, so long as it’s related to the interests of this blog. And specifically, if you want to promote your own work, feel free! My ultimate hope, though it might take a while to get there, is that there it will be a great place for you to learn about new things in the fields this blog covers, and also to get an audience quickly when you want one. So please join up and post!

In general, I’d like to promote the most rapid possible flow of information around the world, and I think sites like Facebook can help that. There’s no reason that the information flowing around needs to be the useless trivia of somebody’s everyday life. And it makes no sense for those of us who are a little older to avoid such things just because they started as social networks for undergraduates.

By the way, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard (where Facebook originated), it was one of the favorite past-times of many students, myself included, to discuss with their room-mates the other students in the “facebook” (the book of pictures handed out to Harvard students so that we could learn each others’ names.) My picture above, (scanned and given to me a few months ago by my former room-mate Joshua Burton) is an example of what they looked like. Given the popularity of this past-time at Harvard and the notoriety of the facebooks, I’m not surprised Facebook originated there.

Extra: Check out this 2000 Class Day address by Conan O’Brien, another graduate of the class of ‘85. There’s a funny bit about the facebook; actually the whole thing is funny.