oh, i forgot to write about the people

i may indeed be autistic. :)

the people are nice. i usually have meals either with my team and their friends and/or with these 2 other interns, gregory and luke, who are also into programming languages. we sometimes talk about our programming languages club (which doesn't exist).

in general the people are quite interesting. everyone is laid back (most people wear free t-shirts to work every day), not pretentious, and smart/curious without being annoying about it. at meals we'll talk about a wide variety of things: sports, random engineering projects (potato guns, etc.), how things work, why things work, life, liberty, etc.

a story: google had switched over to biodegradable silverware and people were complaining about it one day, and someone said that her friend claimed that his biodegradable spoon had dissolved while he'd been stirring coffee. to see whether or not this fact was true, someone else put a spoon in hot water. the spoon got more bendy but did not dissolve. this cup of water + spoon ended up on my desk, and while looking at it one day i started wondering whether or not it the acidity of coffee may have contributed to dissolving the spoon. after some deliberation and procrastination we tried to confirm this by soaking biodegradable utensils in coca-cola (pH of high 2's or low 3's. 3 days later they still had not shown signs of physical deterioration. unfortunately we were never clever enough to try hot coffee itself.

another story: this one guy at work is known for doing the pepsi-coke challenge. people had talked about it and i figured he just gave people cups of the stuff and asked them to taste. what i discovered is that he is quite intense about this, labeling 20+ cups (i want to say 24 because it is divisible by 2 and 3...) with the letters of the alphabet and pours coke into half and pepsi into half, marking down which he put into which. he then gives participants 3 cups, 1 of which is different, and has them say which one. when i did it i did it wrong b/c i went back and retasted but i still got it wrong. :( 2/3 of us go it correct, though.

that is all for now.