Finally, things are getting exciting with the possibility of wireless electricity in near future, thanks to folks at the MIT. “Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries”
I came across this interesting article on Sanskrit and its application in Artificial Intelligence. I managed to understand some aspects of author’s arguments, in part due to my basic understanding of the Sanskrit language. However, significant part of the paper requires academic investigation. Some of the figures have clearly been added to the original text and are out-of-place, for example, the figure that illustrates application of XSL transformations to XML data to generate C header and source files!
Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence
Categories
0/0 = NaN!
A professor from University of Reading has received lot of skepticism for inventing ‘nullity’ – a value that defines zero divided by zero. An excerpt from a harsh but interesting critic’s blog: “Basically, he’s defined a non-solution to a non-problem.”
Rich Karlgaard of Forbes has collected a fascinating list of 10 laws of the modern world. The usual suspect (Moore’s Law) is at the top of the list, but there are several new and insightful ones. My favourite in that list is Ogilvy’s Law! What’s yours?
Categories
Mozart of Maths
Grigory Perelman solved one of the hardest and a century-old problem in mathematics called the Poincare Conjecture, but declined the Fields Medal. Another winner – Terence Tao – is one of the youngest winners at the age of 31. An excerpt from an article at NewScientist says something about him – “If you’re stuck on a problem, then one way out is to interest Terence Tao”.
Categories
The Free Lunch Is Over
An excellent article by Herb Sutter that highlights the most significant learning curve for software developers – concurrency. An associated thought is promising work in the area of Software Transactional Memory, that may be the next generation solution for concurrency. Original link from a discussion thread at Lambda the Ultimate.
It seems life really is faster in the city — even for birds. Birds living in urban areas sing a faster tune than their slower country counterparts. The change in birdsong may help their calls to be heard over the howl of traffic and the wind.
India’s GDP growth in the July-September quarter rose to 9.2% year on year and this is encouraging, but there are signs of overheating – inflation has nearly doubled over the past 12 months; equity and housing markets look overbought; and the current account has moved sharply into deficit.
A wonderful documentary about the lost temples of India by the Discovery channel. It starts, of course, with the obvious choice – the Taj Mahal, but the documentary is about the Brihadeeswara temple at Tanjore, built by Raja Raja Chola. Length: 52:10 mins.