I have blogged about 5 days last month – my lowest since June 2000. Guess it shows that the combination of consulting and family life cures even the most determined Web addicts. I’m not sure when life will return to normal. Please excuse the infrequent updates until then.
The Economist on how copyrights aren’t really helping creativity, which is what they were intended to do in the first place. via andersja
Some (light?) reading on physics: Motion Mountain – a rather large and comprehensive physics book for download. And some links on Quantum Field Theory.
Letters to the Editor. Except that they’re a marketing campaign. By the President, no less. via Scripting News
Smarter spam via Scripting News
The first time Bertie meets Jeeves. via RobotWisdom
John Ashmead offers a view of quantum mechanics in which the collapse of the wave function can be done away with. Given that the world is emphatically quantum mechanical, there should be no separate domain of competence for classical physics. All classical results should ultimately be explicated in quantum terms. I was long hoping this was the case.
US is the biggest threat to world peace?! A Time survey. via kuro5hin
Now IBM offers supercomputing on demand. Pricing is unclear, but Big Blue is clearly positioning itself as the computer utility house of the 21st century.
Kazaa is next. Even though it’s not based in the US, Kazaa has been ruled to be subject to US laws. No matter what the outcome, Kazaa is going to be in trouble. Well, time to move on to the next P2P software.
Obesity reduces lifespan. An obese 20-year-old man may have his life expectancy cut by as many as 13 years compared with normal-weight people.
The real face of Jesus. Jesus, it turns out, looked like a peasant, bearded and green-brown eyed. At least, if forensic anthropology is to be believed. via Nilesh
Article on 64-bit processors. Interesting description of the PC industry pecking order: Microsoft > Intel > HP / Dell. Keeping that in mind does help predict a lot of the PC’s future. via RobotWisdom
The Future of the Book from Xerox PARC is an interesting paper I picked up from The Social Life of Information by Brown and Duguid.
Top 10 books of the millenium. Notables: Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
A photographic history of Vajpayee from Rediff, to commemorate his 78th birthday.
Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 web design mistakes of 2002. Fortunately, I was committing only one of them – fixed font sizes. Now rectified.
2002 in pictures – links on MetaFilter.
Reckoners: an e-book on the history of early electronic computers. via RobotWisdom
Interesting article on The Economist on the value of a cluttered desk. … the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, “are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data…” (There’s a “Clean your desk” initiative at BCG Mumbai going on right now.)