Me: "Did you see when Obama visited Google and answered the question about sorting 32-bit integers?"
Azer: "No, I missed it."
Me:
Azer: "Obama definitely has his charm. His answer was cute. If it were Al Gore, he'd say, [dull voice] 'When I was at Harvard, we made an improved version of quicksort. It was called quickersort. That's what I would use to sort a million 32-bit integers. Also, I invented quickersort.'"
Me: [lol]
Gore has been a really funny guy in guest spots on Futurama and 30 Rock.
ReplyDeleteBTW, he never said he "invented the internet"; that was right-wing propaganda. But hey, "it's funny because it's false."
Al Gore's support of the Internet, by V.Cerf and B.Kahn
ReplyDeleteThu, 28 Sep 2000
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html
Background behind that. I ended up being the person (at first just me, then another person came on board) who, an hour or so before a Presidential candidate started speaking at Google, would take the top questions as entered and voted on at what became Google Moderator, and edit them into a sheet I'd pass on to Eric or whoever the interviewer was.
ReplyDeleteReason for the edit pass was that sometimes you'd get multiple questions on the same topic, someone would bury a popular question inside verbiage that applied to them and not Eric, etc.
For McCain, who was the first candidate to speak, when I gave the list to Eric I pointed out that one question, submitted by Schwim, would make a darn good icebreaker. Eric used it, which was the "sort a million integers" question, which got a good laugh even though McCain didn't try to answer it.
Now, for no other candidate was that question used. I'd left Google shortly before the Obama talk (but got to see it; long story), so don't know if the question was resubmitted, if Eric just decided to do it on the spur of the moment, or what. But when Obama gave his answer, I figured either he'd been incredibly well-prepped by people who seen every Candidate@Google talk and had answers for all questions, or someone leaked it to him in advance.
Ha ha this is awesome!!!
ReplyDeleteBut don't you think it might have been scripted?
Wow.....Obama EVEN knew bubble sort......
ReplyDelete