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a little “easter egg” in a paper
By stephen | October 4, 2007
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I was reading “Diffusion of Behavior and Equilibrium Properties in Network Games” by Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv. I’m not done with it yet, so I can’t post a full review. However, I did want to highlight a funny “easter egg” I found in their paper, that clearly highlights their preference for operating systems.
In the introduction, it says, “some behaviors or states propagate and explode within the population (e.g., Windows OS, the HIV virus)”. And, in the next paragraph, “We study a framework in which agents face a choice between to actions, 0 and 1 (e.g., whether to pursue a certain level of education, switch to Linux OS, etc.)”.
What are they getting at? Do they have a distaste for Windows as they do for HIV? Are they saying that pursuit of education and the switch to Linux OS go hand in hand? I think that is what they are saying.
For the record, and for my geek cred, my laptop is a Lenovo 3000 n100 running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I do have windows installed as a dual boot, but the only time I ever use it is when I need to use my USB video capture tool, which isn’t yet supported in linux.
My desktop box happens to be a custom build
- Athlon XP 4000 with Ruby Orb CPU fan
- Asus A8N-SLI Premium with 2GB RAM
- BFG NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT w/ 512MB, driving a 22″ Acer widescreen LCD
- 2 SATA drives
- 700 watt Thermaltake power supply
- Sound comes out of Cambridge FPS-2000 digital speakers
- Microsoft Natural Keyboard (the MS product I swear by) and some cheap mouse
That system is also running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. That’s what I’ve got. Is that geek enough? I hope so. Here are its guts:
Topics: Academic Journals and Papers |
[…] This is a good post over at econsteve.com […]
Posted by: academic paper easter eggs on October 4th, 2007 at 8:11 amYeah thats pretty geeky. I’ve never even heard of that stuff before.
Posted by: Tom on October 4th, 2007 at 4:58 pm