2002

Escher’s Ascending and Descending in LEGO. Also Belvedere and Balcony. via Metafilter

Spotted this ad on Business Standard. It was at the bottom of the page, and initially, I thought it really was an ant crawling across my laptop. Incidentally, catching the ant is not all that easy. Took me a minute. But once you catch it, it stays put. Business Standard no longer has an ad with an ant crawling across the bottom of the page.

Amrita has mirrored pictures of the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet. Since she has no bandwidth restrictions, please visit that site.

Yahoo’s “Magic Crystal Ball” New Age Oracle or Ouija2K? I got a mail from a Brian, who found my chat with [email protected] through a Yahoo search. I did the same, and came up with this even more hilarious conversation.

Growth, Form, Function, and Crashes: an article from the Santa Fe institute. It explains scale-free fairly well. The point is, scale-free networks have a few hubs. If you knock a hub out, the network is fragmented. But your chance of knocking a hub out by random is small, since there are so few of them. That makes scale-free networks reliable as well as vulnerable. Slightly more technical details at PhysicsWeb by the creators of scale-free networks. It also says that if you design a network, it may not be scale-free. But if you let it evolve, it probably will be.

The Internet is a scale free network.

Photos from the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet.

The world’s funniest joke. The joke deals with a man getting shot. And when I think about it, I can’t phrase is better than Asimov did in Jokester. “The point is,” said Meyerhof, “that I have pictured a husband being humiliated by his wife; a marriage that is such a failure that the wife is convinced that her husband lacks any virtue. Yet you laugh at that. If you were the husband, would you find it funny?”. ...

Salomon Smith Barney sold the CEO of WorldCom lots of IPO shares at a low price. The CEO made lots of money. Technically, that’s a bribe to your customer. But then, so is every free offer, or cross-sale. What makes the SSB-WorldCom deals illegal, this article argues, is that they’re so BIG, and they’re made of OTHER people’s money.

The real reason for .NET: taking Windows to UNIX.

After reading my post on the ET article mentioning “expected to see a higher than expected rise”, a certain CA gold-medallist friend of mine wrote back this obscure note that I refuse to understand: … if you take it literally it is not possible. To put it more technically, something called a law of iterated expectation comes to play. Today’s expectation of tomorrow’s expectation about what will happen day after is just today’s expectation of what will happen day after. ...

Lavish weddings. Sounds a bit of a waste… but if I were offered a wedding in Disneyland, with “Cinderella’s Crystal Coach”, I’d probably pay the $40,000. If I had it, that is.

Indian TV commercial storyboards. The plots of several TV ads, in pictures and words. via Someplace Simple

RIAA sues radio stations for playing their music. (No, not really. It’s a spoof. But I wouldn’t be surprised.) via Scripting News

Reactions to Google’s revised search algorithm. People’s rankings on certain keywords appear to have changed. Mine hasn’t. So far.

I have an over-developed dorsal striatum. That’s the brain part that makes you want to eat when you’re not hungry, just because the food’s there. via Plastic

There’s no point buying faster PCs, since there aren’t many applications that need more computing power, says this NY Times article. via Scripting News In the past, the bulk of PC sales came from replacements. I’ve seen PCs being replaced because they didn’t have enough RAM for Windows 3.1, or Windows NT ran too slow on them. Today, I’d rather spend the money on a digital video camera and an additional hard disk. My 1.6GHz processor is faster than I need anyway. ...

The Social Life of Documents. Interesting article by Xerox’s PARC on the role of documents in the New Economy.

Infosys, Wipro and TCS are “expected to see a higher than expected rise” in their revenues. Hmm… I didn’t know that was logically possible.

Broad and insightful talk by Diamond on why history unfolded differently across continents. Note that he’s talking about why and not how. Based on his book: Guns, Germs and Steel.