Mas Geek

Crush of the Week: Aaron Patzer

I’ve been an occasional user of mint.com for the past year but when they recently announced a bunch of new features I decided to re-visit the site.  In learning about these new features I came across this fellow, Founder and CEO of mint.com Aaron Patzer:

Why, hello there

As I read more about Mr. Patzer I realized he would be perfect for Crush of the Week.  Even without that face this man is nerd heaven.  He’s been messing about with computers since he was 6 years old and has been in business for himself since he was 16.  He got his three bachelor’s degrees from Duke University in computer science, electrical engineering, and computer engineering.  Let’s all take a minute to cool off because it gets hotter.  Next up was Princeton where he started out in a Ph.d. program but later switched to a Master’s program in electrical engineering.  After helping build the Cell microprocessor he figured what the hell, I’ll start my own personal finance website to take on Microsoft Money and Quicken. Because why not? So he spent months chugging along with that project, building the site and company on his own.  How did he make it work? By being sexy:  “I knew nothing about Java web services, little about databases, little about management, and only some on recruiting and building a company.  But I was really good at one thing: algorithms.” Algorithms.  (Note to self: update match.com profile to include being really good at algorithms as a pre-req).

Mint.com was launched in mid-2007 at the TechCrunch40 conference, where it of course won. Today over 1 million people use the site and they are adding three-thousand new users every day.  As the site’s success grows so too does Mr. Patzer’s hotness.  Still need convincing? Consider these fun facts:

1. He likes long walks on the beach:

2. He’s done time in prison:

(JOKE)

3. He’s deep:

In fiction, my hero’s are Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – he’s actually the person I most identify with – along with the characters in Atlas Shrugged, and Henry Bannon in Calumet K.

4. He’s on Twitter.

5. He’s friends with Suze Orman:

OK, this is getting a bit stalker-y so I’ll end here.  What do you think though? Isn’t he a catch?

Comics for Coke Dealers

Police in Denver busted a meth lab and along with the drugs and cash they found $500k worth of comic books. Apparently they are useful for laundering money and generating cash in a pinch.

Michael Jackson was a chubby chaser

Some “heavy set” mo is claiming that he had a romantic affair with Michael Jackson. It seems that Michael was into clingy guys because although the affair was short-lived the gentleman says he has lost his soul-mate. The best part is that this guy worked at Michael’s dermatologist office, the same place he met his ex-wife and the alleged sperm donor of his kids! Only in L.A. can you go in for a laser peel and come out with a wife, a baby daddy, and a side ho.

The Big Bang Visualized

Physicist Janna Levin explaining the Big Bang and what may or may not be going on with our universe/reality/my head just exploded:

Data Visualization Porn

Wired Science posted the best science visualization videos of 2009 as selected by The Department of Energy at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Sit back, drop some acid, and enjoy.

"All possibilities are contained in the 10th Dimension"

Neat little animation illustrating a way to think about a 10 dimensional universe. According to several of the comments on the BoingBoing post the science behind it is mostly nonsense but I still think it’s a fun way to think about dimensions beyond the 4 that we’re used to.

Reading facial expressions not universal

Here are the western emoticons for happy, sad, and surprise respectively:

: ) : ( : o

these are meant to be mentally rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

Here are the Asian emoticons for happy, sad, and surprise:

(^_^) (T_T) (*_*)

The obvious difference is that the western emoticons vary the mouth while the Asian emoticons vary the eyes.