Author name: S Anand

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?”.

He waited a moment in thought, then said, “Try this one, Trask: Abner was seated at his wife’s sickbed, weeping uncontrollably, when his wife, mustering the dregs of her strength, drew herself up to one elbow.’

” ‘Abner,’ she whispered, ‘Abner, I cannot go to my Maker without confessing my misdeed.’

” ‘Not now,’ muttered the stricken husband. ‘Not now, my dear. Lie back and rest.’

” ‘I cannot,’ she cried. ‘I must tell, or my soul will never know peace. I have been unfaithful to you, Abner. In this very house, not one month ago’

” ‘Hush, dear,’ soothed Abner. ‘I know all about it. Why else have I poisoned you?’ “

Trask tried desperately to maintain equanimity but did not entirely succeed. He suppressed a chuckle imperfectly.

Meyerhof said, “So that’s funny, too. Adultery. Murder. All funny.”

And these are the “clean” jokes. Why is humour funny?

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.

I think what they mean by “…” is that the revised expectation is higher than the earlier expectation.

She is in the habit of being right, so I had better accede.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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