Year: 2002

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

IGPC makes 65% of the world’s stamps. Their site has pictures of some recent stamps issued by India. via Metafilter

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 magiccrystalball@yahoo.com 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?”.

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.