Didn't Marconi steal the notebook of Jagdish Chandra Bose and came up with the idea of the "coherer"? So wonder where he pinched this idea from.

Thanks for the correction. It would have been so easy to check it using the calci lying on the table, but I was just too lazy.

Ages ago, seems like bronze age to me now, I was a freshman in college and got my first calculator. A tiny Casio-Fx48 creditcard sized one. It was only 9 decimal digits accurate, but its floating point number range went all the way up to a googol, 9.9999999e+99. That number is so huge, it is more than the number of subatomic particles in the known universe. Ming bogglingly huge number. In math such things are so common. For example the function factorial, reaches a googol at 79. Yup, Factorial (79) > number of subatomic particles in the known universe.

I read the book "Fun With Numbers" by Mir publications, Moscow in 10th grade. It talked about simple things like immensity of a number like pow(2,64) explained in a simple language a 10th grader could get. (pow(2,64) rice grains would need a barn 3 meter wide, 3 meters tall and several times the distance of Earth to Moon or something like that).

So Mandelbrot set could exceed the resolution of the known universe, by some version of the definition of these terms, in as little as 64 iterations.

Yeah, I know about java security model being completely broken as a plug-in. It has been two years since the advisory came out. Still our vpn vendor is pushing a java-plug-in based solution and our IT is still buying that load of crap. What to do?

f I have the capital resources to invest in a home energy system to go off the grid and say the payback time is 15 years. I and many other people might decide to do just that.

Remember, your parents did exactly that. I957 was the peak of street car/public transportation. Every one who could afford a car, bought one, leaving the remaining riders to pay for the amortized cost of public transportation. Almost all of the street car companies went bankrupt in 20 years. Of course, there was this illegal secret cartel of Firestone, Ford and Standard Oil that speeded up the demise by secretly buying key transfer points of the network and shut them down. But they were also actively aided and abetted by local politicians promising a car on every drive way and a chicken in every pot, and the people also thought it was a good idea to ditch public transportation.

What? NG gas turbine takes 3 to 6 hours to start? You should tell this to the airplane manufacturers. All the turbo-fan engines powering all the airplanes and helicopters are gas turbines [*]. If they are going to take 3 to 6 hours to start, they should never turn their engines off, or they would be stuck at the gate for three to six hours.

[*] I know they use kerosene but combustion of NG is even easier than liquid fuels.

When it rains it pours. I am battling a serious RAID controller failure at my work desktop. At least I could go home, use VPN to access some common team servers to do some work. Lo, and behold! St Murphy, the patron saint of all things barfing, decides to step in at this critical juncture. Chrome decides to cut Java. Our wonderful IT had bought VPN software that relies on java plug-in in the browser. OK firefox will come to my rescue, so I thought. But St Murphy had anticipated my move.

When everything fails, you sell your soul to Satan and decide to fire up, gasp, internet explorer. For some odd reason it manages to get past all the hurdles gets the network extender running. Satan is laughing at St Murphy. St Murphy never loses, his revenge will come soon, and it will be swift.

In the meantime, caught as a mere pawn in the eternal battle between Satan and St Murphy I am ruing my fate and belly aching in slashdot.

Before the light there was the sound. The sound permeated and filled the universe. That sound is "aum". It is the cosmic sound of the brahman.

BTW, don't dare ask. You know the answer. It is aum all the way. aum sweet aum all the way aum.

No wonder Open Tech is closing in Microsoft. It is the brilliant minds of Microsoft that conceived of putting " shut down " in the "start" menu. It was so bad it became good, and now even Microsoft is not able to get rid of the start button. Same way they might find it impossible to close their open tech.

I mean they have been repeatedly asking who let the dogs out. But I thought no one cared. Looks like there is a scientist who cared. Good for him or her.

NPR had a Ken Burns documentary on cancer, the emperor of maladies (or mother of all diseases or something similar).

It was a typical Ken Burns documentary, history etc. One salient part of the documentary was that cancer is not a single disease. It is a huge variety of diseases causing uncontrolled cell divisions. Further the cancer a patient has changes, evolves over time. Many promising drugs work very well initially but the cancer adapts to the drug.

Another salient part of it is the exponential increase in the cost of treatment. It has gone upwards of 100,000$ per patient per year in drugs. I am sure the researchers in Caltech know more about it than I do, but still, one wonders are they raising hopes needlessly and prematurely.

The call for papers have always been difficult to read pieces of work. You quickly glance at the deadlines to see if you can get one in, then the location to see if it is worth going there and pass on. Except for the more aged members of the academia who sit in panels and act as editors to pad up an useless CV no one cares about all these names in these calls.

So it is not as difficult to create spurious call for papers.

The word "selfie" has been pre empted in the digital camera world to mean a different thing.

Well, it should just follow the software industry's path breaking achievements in shaping user expectations and user behavior.

First there should be an EULA claiming the body and soul of the user, with added clauses to add more demands later any time.

Then user should be made to accept, "it is going to crash and burn. Can I get get something done in the mean time?".

If it builds we ship. Then the customer feedback is how we know whether what we built works. This is the software industry standard.

If you don't want to be evil, you will very generously call your product "in beta".

That is not the game played by lottery. To keep the pot at 200 million, and nplayers=20, we need to raise the price of the ticket to 10million + house margin. Something like 22 million. (Yes, the pot is less than 50% of the collection) So would you pay 22 million bucks for 1/20 chance of winning 200 million dollars?