Do you really have to stoop to such low levels?

They are: Jesper Lutzen, Efim Zelmanov, David Brillinger, Craig Evans, Herbert Wilf, John Mason, Paul Seymour, George Papanicolau, Christos H. Papadimitriou and Marsha Berger.

As always, I’ll be writing about the “take home message” from these talks. For those at SFU, these will be held in the IRMACS center as usual.

When my friend finally dropped me home later that day, the roads looked like an ice-rink. With a bunch of amateur skaters. Stalled cars, jack-knifed buses and people shoveling snow to uncover their vehicles. Funny sight. Not.

School’s closed today as well.

• A dialogue on Mathematics & Physics by Chaitin and Calude.
• Ultimate physical limits to computation. Physical limits as determined by the speed of light, Planck’s constant and the Gravitation constant.
• Physics of Climate Modeling in Physics Today. Also check out the comments on RealClimate.
• Linux running on the PlayStation3.
• Information Processing: Metric on the space of genomes and scientific basis for race. Plotting genomes of humans leads to easily identifiable clusters of ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians and Native Americans.
• Comments on Nature’s open peer review experiment and the lack of anonymity by Derek Lowe.
• GigaOm: 2007 is all about monetization of social networks.
• Barclays Ph.D.s Build Hedge Fund Giant Inside Bank. Great article about math, physics and finance.
• rod gets ripped outright. Some strong words, but I understand his feelings. Writing about and pointing to interesting content takes time. On the other hand, I can’t help but paraphrase Zappa: “I should be worried if my music isn’t being copied.”
• Misbehavior of markets by Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. Since I’m taking a non-linear physics course this semester, I went to amazon to check out the reviews — not very appealing. (via rod)

The only way to survive is to do shit and see what happens. You just have to have enough shit going on that some big shit happens. — Tom Peters

Now that 2006 is past us, it’s safe to look back and reflect. My “strategy” for most of 2006 has been to try new and challenging things. Sure, putting myself outside my comfort zone has increased my failure rate, but as a total percentage, I’ve had more success. A hundred percent of nothing is still nothing.

Happy new year!

Civilization just comes to a halt with a blackout. I couldn’t shower (electric heater) or groom myself, couldn’t make breakfast or lunch (electric cookers) or even see myself (sun rises at 9am and sets at 4pm). All of the stores around my place were closed. Just think of the lost opportunities.

Stanley park is in a state of chaos. There are fallen trees everywhere with power lines below them. There’s no power yet, so the place is pitch dark. A dangerous place to be.

Apparently, even MSFT [[check out their new spiffy homepage]] was shut down today due to winds in the Redmond area.

Dr James Anderson, a researcher from the University of Reading’s computer science department recently came up with a new way to represent the result of dividing zero with zero. I’ve long relied on signaling Not-a-Number (NaNS) to look for unstable or ill-conditioned numerical problems. I don’t see how this changes things the way they are right now.

Computers simply cannot divide by zero. Try it on your calculator and you’ll get an error message.

But Dr Anderson has come up with a theory that proposes a new number – ‘nullity’ – which sits outside the conventional number line (stretching from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity).

I’m passing along two counter-arguments that point out succinctly what’s wrong with the approach. Well worth a read:

• Open letter to James Anderson
• Nullity – the Nonsense Number

If you want to invoke flyspell-mode everytime you go into LaTex-mode, add this hook to your .emacs file:

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

On a related note, over the last few months, I’ve noticed an increased interest in running Linux as the primary platform. People seem to be amazed that a default installation of a modern distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu comes with so much fully functional, free software. Is this the tipping point for the adoption of Linux?

I find this very intriguing. A couple of years back, my friends and I started a Linux User Group at SFU called SFLUG. Back then, there seemed to be artificial roadblocks to the adoption of Linux (most important of these were the “free” availability of Microsoft software.) Having used Linux for over half a decade, I didn’t understand this at that time. Now I think I do.

The two screenshots, with and without the print dialog open: