When I started this blog, I was going to focus on the scads of how-to books I’ve been consuming and projects I’ve been working on during my sabbatical (or “unemployment,” if you must). Things change, and I’ve ended up posting mostly pictures of stuff or commentary on things unrelated to my little vacation, except in that I found them while wasting time on the internet.

So, to focus a little, I’m ghettoing my internet novelty/link posts to a new Tumblr account, which makes posting such things about a million times easier and frees up this blog for longer-form, true-to-the-original-plan posts. I’ve been playing with Tumblr for a few days, so you can see what you think before you commit to any sort of bookmark or subscribe to that RSS feed. I read too many blogs, so I promise there will be a nice and steady stream of interesting things popping up.

Posts at this blog will be less frequent, but hopefully they will also be better since I can’t use pictures of dollar bill Albert Einstein to pretend like I’m actually generating any content. At some point, I’ll try to move the Tumblr stuff over to my domain name in some way, but for now, it’s staying pretty at http://matlockmatlock.tumblr.com.

Enjoy the procrastination of an expert.

“What could be more unforgettable than dollar bill Albert Einstein?”

After posting up that wordle visualization of my senior thesis, I decided to take a look back through the archives to see what other interesting things I could unearth. Reading one’s own college essays is an experience in humor and embarrassment that I could not just keep to myself. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to you to put up the actual essays, so instead I’ve collected their titles, my recollections, and some visuals courtesy of Wordle for your amusement. Enjoy after the jump.

I saw Wordle on the blog of one of my future classmates, where she ran her thesis through it, so I decided to try it out on my own college thesis, just for kicks.

Basically, you copy in text, and it makes a picture of the top 150 words, varying in size according to their frequency. Here’s mine:

That appears to sum up my academic interests quite nicely. Maybe I should bring a copy to these meetings I’m having with faculty to explain myself.

(Words of note: the indistinguishable “indistinguishable” beneath the OR of “recording,” “woman,” above the D in “sounds,” and “Schafer” under the MU of “music.” I have no idea why woman would have shown up that often, especially given that I was particularly neglectful of female artists in my paper. Also, it appears that my obsession with Schafer-bashing turned up here. Also, it is so cool that “Metal” turned up at the top, capitalized of course because it usually refers to Metal Machine Music or Metal Acoustic Music.)

I had to add: I just learned that Metal Machine Music is sampled in the TV on the Radio song “Let the Devil In,” and that there exists a Killers song that begins in a similar way to a track on Metal Machine Music. Now I’m done.

Not actually done. I searched my thesis for “woman” to figure out the mystery, and it turns out it shows up a ton of times in a row in my description of Turing’s imitation game. So there you have it.