Ganesh Swami

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

One of my favorite minor-modes in emacs is the flyspell-mode. It continuously marks all words not found in the ispell-dictionary as you type. It’s particularly useful with AucTeX because it skips comments and TeX markup.

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)

Upon the recommendation of a business leader I highly respect, I read the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This book talks about uncorrelated incremental changes that lead to a giant change (think runaway process.) Malcolm’s background is in disease propagation. The tipping point is when an epidemic reaches critical mass, at which point it becomes very difficult to contain it. You can see similar trends in nuclear reactions, word-of-mouth viral marketing, and ofcourse rumors.

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.