« April 2005 | Main | June 2005 »
George Dantzig, had solved two unsolved mathematics/statistics problems, mistaking them as homework problems.
Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem)
As soon as they put phone functionality, and double their hard drive space, I am going to buy it. (whatever it takes)
Interesting Story.
Star War's Revenge of the Sith, the final episode, will shatter box office records. Thats definite.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Fans braced for Star Wars finale
Fans had lined up outside LA's Grumman Chinese theatre months before the release (yes, camping out there).
The craze behind the movie is immense.
Sometimes, it feels that movies is what people want. If you want to do anything, which will affect a lot of people, or which most people would want to see/listen/hear/use, then making a popular movie it is.
Movies is a universal concept -- starting with story-telling from the very early days. People like to experience fictional stories, since they are more interesting than their own lives. Millions will watch this Star Wars movie in the first few days of its release. Then billions will watch it in the coming time, in theatre or on DVD. Thousands of people will watch this movie dozens of times.
Technology is also, of course universal. But the amount of impact maybe a little less. Of course, ipod sold millions, but thats only millions, not billions. And of course, the ipod does not come out every quarter, like blockbuster films come out. If IBM made the computer, ofcourse it was even more blockbuster than a film, but you have to realize that its not just one company that plays a part in such a product. There were lot of companies involved with lot of precursor of products involved, ultimately that will include thousands and thousands of people behind the development of the computer.
Whereas movies are made by just a small bunch of people. A small bunch of people make such a big impact.
Ofcourse, as with everything, the line is not solid here as well.
For example, the entertainment behind a movie will last for 3 hours and then cease. So if you count number of hours multiplied by each person that watched that movie, then the number of man hours impacted by that movie will be much less than the number of man hours that have been impacted by a computer.
Hmm. Actually, computer has been able to start new economies as well. Millions or more people depend on the computer for livelihood. Nobody depends on watching movies as means of livelihood, and if they do, they are very few.
Technology is an enabler of action - Movies (or other art) are an emotional experience.
Probably it is difficult to compare these two.
So I take my sentence back, and conclude that, as always, there is no single truth.
Trevor Blackwell made his own Segway - with great description of how he built it.
Amazing...!
I had thought that Yahoo Search has improved a lot over past few months. But now I know: whatever Yahoo does, I think its going to be difficult for them to overtake Google in search excellence.
The brainy people at Google have put in such witty logic in the search, that search at Yahoo (even now) seems primitive.
Cases in point, that I encountered today:
- a search for MIT Stata Center showed that Yahoo gave wierd results. The link I wanted, Google had that right at the top. Even Clusty gave better results, even though it uses neither Google nor Yahoo.
- a search for Gaurang Bookmarks again defeats Yahoo. Even though Yahoo has crawled my updated website (as evident from it Cache output), and I have removed the link to http://gaurang.org/bookmarks.html and changed it to http://gaurang.org/bookmarks/xbel.html several weeks ago, it still gives the old link (and not the new link).
- Another search makes Yahoo give an erroneous link at the Number 3, which has been erroneous for several months now. Whereas Google had removed it only a few days after it became erroneous. Btw, its not exactly erroneous, I dont know how google managed to figure that out.
Google's search logic is so clever that it gives the eerie feeling of artifical intelligence sometimes.
No wonder, why Google is the most popular search tool today.
Yahoo is Very Good, but Google is Excellent.