It’s 4am. I can’t sleep. Too much stuff to think about. Here’s a quick sampling of the sort of thing that I think about at this time of day before I have to be up for work in four hours.
Lots of people say that we count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers. To which, I ask, If we can count from 0 to 10, then why do we need two digits to write down the highest number we can have with fingers?
A much more natural base for counting on your fingers is base 6. Here’s what I want you to try. Your right hand will serve as the ones digit, and your left hand serves as the tens. Start counting.
One is easy. Raise your right index finger. Two, raise the next one. Similarly through five. At six, it becomes slightly trickier, because six is now ‘ten’. Your left index finger goes up, and your right hand closes. Now again, counting from 11 to 15 is very simple. To go to 20, close your right hand and raise another finger.
In this manner, you can count up to 55 - which would be 35 in base 10 terms, far more than the paltry 10 you claim your ten fingers are for counting! Switching bases back and forth is a bit tedious, I’ll agree, but once you get used to it, it’s far more useful than a simple 10 fingers.
Did you know that Google has books in the public domain scanned in, and you can download them in EPUB format, load them right on and go to town? Isn’t that just awesome?!
Consider this: Right now, Google has over 7.5 million books scanned written in English and in the public domain. If I could read those at a rate of one per minute, for 16 hours a day, I’d be finished in… roughly 21 years. And that’s just the free ones I actually can understand. I’ve been threatening to learn to read Japanese and Russian for a while, but if occurs to me now that if I do, I’ll have yet more books to read.
As it is, I already have over 200 books on the thing. Most of them science fiction paperbacks. If you stacked them one on top of another, they’d reach 12.5 feet high. I haven’t had to charge it in a month. Pretty impressive for something that’s only a third of an inch thick.
In a single copy of the New York Times, there is more information than your average medieval peasant was exposed to in their entire life. In the Information Age, you will not be characterized by the amount of information you have available to you. You will be characterized by the quality of information you receive, the choices of what you take in.
Think about that next time somebody sends you another email with a LOLcat in it.
Up until this weekend, I was completely convinced that the 0xDEADBEEF was more a programming joke than an actual system error message. This weekend, I learned a lot.
Was reloading the wife's grandmother's computer after a particularly nasty crash. When I attempted a Windows repair install, the mythical 0XDEADBEEF reared its ugly head not once, but three separate times.
So, yeah. I ended up formatting and wiping out the whole thing.
they lost some stuff, but the whole experience was somewhat surreal.
