Ganesh Swami

I’ve been really busy this week preparing for work (at the MIAL), so I’m going to cop out and post a bunch of links that I found interesting:

• 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!

The winds around the Burnaby mountain area were so bad yesterday. First, I was kept awake until 3 by the constant howling. When I finally fell asleep, I was abruptly woken up at 6am when my feet froze up. The winds had taken a bunch of power lines down and my building and the entire locality around the Lougheed Town Center was out of power.

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.