When I was in elementary school, one of the weekly vocabulary exercises I had to complete was in the topic of “fields of study.” This basically meant that our class had to learn the etymology of many of those terms ending in the root “-ology,” or “field of study” – a task I’m sure we all had to complete at some point in our education. Read more...

Photo: It might be hard to update your Facebook status with this. (Wikipedia Creative Commons)

Bits of change Computer science is a changing landscape. The truths and limitations of today may not necessarily hold for the next. The rate at which new innovations in computer science are developed is dizzying, and this is an exciting yet somewhat humbling fact. Read more...

Photo: (Creative commons photo by christiaan_008 via Flickr)

Computer science, by itself, is irrelevant. Of course, you could generalize that argument to all fields of study, but at least when you study biology, even if you don’t apply it somewhere, you understand how cells and organisms, including yourself, function. Read more...

Photo: (Kelly Brennan/Daily Bruin senior staff)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, you can’t burn yourself by touching a firewall. Most of our everyday encounters with firewalls usually don’t go beyond scouring Google for a way to bypass them so that we can stream our movies. Read more...

Photo: (Creative commons photo by Dani_vr via Flickr)

“404 Page Not Found.” “Unable to connect.” “Unable to join the network.” If you’ve ever tried accessing a website that didn’t exist or tried surfing the Internet while not connected to a network, you probably met a distant cousin of one of the above network error messages. Read more...

Photo: Network packets: hot stuff? (Creative Commons photo by Rob Villanueva via Flickr)