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Back in the 1950s a scientist name Stanley Milgram did a study where he sent a picture of a stock broker in Boston to a bunch of people in midwest and asked them to send the picture to someone in their network who was most likely to know the person. After collecting all the packets at the Bankers address, Milgram calculated the average number of hops from the person in the middle of the country to the Boston Banker was 6.1 stops. This is where the term 6 degrees of separation came from. ...

When I was a freshman in college, my life was cheer. I did cheer breakfast lunch and dinner and loved it. I was committed to a level that generally exceeded most interests on the team. Not saying the team wasn’t committed, I just took it too far. I was often very convinced of my own correctness. I would have conversations about issues with stunts and always have something to add. I’m not saying I wouldn’t listen to other people’s perspectives, but I always had to add my own two cents: ...

I can’t tell you how many years I go to decode the winners of a cheer competition and I can’t find it anywhere. This is not the end all of the results and I’m still looking for the right place to store it, but I also want to start collecting information on cheer teams. Which team finished second place in Small Coed D1 in 2004? How do you find it? History is important, and with all the information we have, I’m surprised we don’t have a better database of this stuff. ...

Life is full of things to catalog, especially for someone like me. Someone who loves organization in data and looking for patterns. Someone who is convinced that the random things in my life will probably come together someday like the unification theory. But how? How does one sort, contain, and search data? The first step is recording the data. There are many ways to do this. Databases have traditionally been a great way. NoSQL databases with their loose document format are interesting. The second brain methodology uses documents or notes to contain the same thing. And while these documents can be formatted in things like Markdown and have front matter for categorization, much of the data is contained in the raw text which means a human has to parse and read it. ...

Coco and I are on this epic van journey that I do about once a year. Currently we are in California, but we are about to head back to the east coast shortly. There is a lot of stuff on the #VanLife movement these days, but not a ton on dogs. Disclaimer: my dog is amazing. She will jump up and kiss you, and jump all over you, but she is relatively regular when it comes to going to the restroom, is vocal she needs to be and holds her business like no one else. ...