how a cs guy interprets life

1. Soccer vs. American football:

Soccer is infinitely more interesting than football. There is only so much you can achieve with a single hop communicatio channel (football). Multihop channels (soccer) have significantly more interesting patterns and more importantly failure modes which make for more interesting viewing.

2. Chinese vs. Indian languages:

Chinese tends to have very small description length words for many situations and objects. Native speakers can compress ridiculous amounts of information into a small written piece or spoken conversation. Naturally, chinese is harder to learn because it involves building up a much larger dictionary than most other languages. Compression using a larger dictionary intuitively will be better (indices into dictionaries only take logarithmic space).

3. Sampras vs. Agassi:

Sampras is a pain to watch because he had no evident failure modes in his game. The lack of any perceivable vulnerability makes him a not-so-interesting entity. Agassi on the other hand is exciting to watch because his game has visible failure and success modes, and the distribution varies game to game.