Random Quotes
Treasure what you have right now,
or else you may regret one day...
Dream as if you'll live forever,
live as if you'll die today.
Life is like a rollercoaster,
Sometimes it goes up and sometimes its goes down,
And you wonder whats going on,
But smile :) and remember that you are sitting in a rollercoaster
--- A friend
"All those who wander are not lost" --- JRR Tolkien
Can you read this
Believe it or not ! You can read it !!
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt..
An Urban Fable
One fine day, a bus driver went to the bus garage, started his bus, and drove off along the route.
No problems for the first few stops, a few people got on, a few got off, and things went generally well.
At the next stop, however, a big hulk of a guy got on. Six feet eight, built like a wrestler, arms hanging down to the ground.
He glared at the driver and said, "Big John doesn't pay!" and sat down at the back.
The driver was five feet three, thin, and basically meek..... Naturally, he didn't argue with Big John, but he wasn't happy about it.
The next day the same thing happened -Big John got on again, said "Big John doesn't pay!" and sat down.
And the next day, and the one after that, and so forth.
This irritated the bus driver, who started losing sleep over the way Big John was taking advantage of his size.
Finally he could stand it no longer. He signed up for body building program, karate, judo and all that good stuff.
By the end of the summer, he had become quite strong;
So on the next Monday, when Big John got on the bus and said, "Big John doesn't pay!" the driver stood up, glared back and screamed, "And why not?"
With a surprised look on his face, Big John replied, "Big John has a Bus pass."
Moral of the story: First be sure is there a problem before working hard to solve one.
"Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman
Cargo Cult Science ---Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I have heard a lot about Fenyman and am simply itching to get my hands on his books, the most notable being "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Fenyman!"
Here are few excerpts from his caltech address. Follow the link at the bottom to read the complete article.
" But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that."
"I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon."
" I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
" In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with. "
" We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. "
When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time."
Source :
"Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman
10 stories that could be pranks - but aren't
1. A Japanese inventor has devised solar-powered clothes which can top up the battery on an iPod or mobile phone.
2. The Home Office is being asked to pardon Anne Boleyn, 500 years after she was executed, because she was "obviously innocent".
3. A study of men who attended lapdancing clubs found one man, named by researchers as "Graham the philanthropist" who went five times a week and believed "he was helping the women to make money quickly so they could become financially independent".
4. A family of four ate 20,000 Kit Kats to win prizes worth £12,000. "We had them for breakfast, dinner and tea," said 53-year-old Pat McGovern of Teesside.
5. Joss Stone has earned £5m, shooting her into the top 20 of a rich list of young entertainers. Will Young is worth £8m.
6. A Belgian police training manual which aims to help recruits understand body language has caused a row by likening George Bush's facial expressions to a chimpanzee's.
7. Thousands of visitors are rushing to Death Valley to see a remarkable range of wild flowers which have bloomed there.
8. A tow-truck driver in South Africa has been arrested on suspicion of tampering with traffic lights to make accidents more likely.
9. Conmen in Slough are getting people to pay £400 for laptops, before handing over bags filled not with computer but with bottles of water.
10. Christopher Eccleston, fresh from getting critical acclaim and near-record ratings as the new Doctor Who, has quit.
Unbelievable aren't they
SOURCE :
BBC NEWS | Magazine | 10 stories that could be pranks - but aren't
Hotmail counters Gmail
Hotmail is boosting the amount of storage space for users of both its free and paid e-mail service.From late summer, the basic allowance will be boosted to 250MB and paying customers will get two gigabytes.
Currently, paying customers of Microsoft's Hotmail get at least 10MB of storage space and those who use it for free have 2MB for their old messages.Boosting storage limits means Hotmail must revamp its charging system which is based around a "pay more to store more" system.
The new service with the boosted storage will be called Hotmail Plus and will cost $19.95 per year. Users who currently pay more for storage will be moved across to this service.
Users of Hotmail Plus will also be able to send messages with attachments up to 20MB in size.
In a related announcement Microsoft said that it will also start using anti-virus software to spot infected e-mails sent to or from its web-based mail service.
Soon after Google's announcement in April Yahoo said it would start offering 100MB to non-paying users and two gigabytes to paying customers. It too changed its charging system and rolled many add-on services into a single subscription package.
Ask Jeeves has also increased the amount of storage for users of its free e-mail services. Now users of MyWay, Excite and IWon will get 125MB of hard disk space.
Others offering a gigabyte of storage include the UK's Planet Tolkien which, through its Shiremail service, gives people an account for £3.50 per month.
Also in the UK Lycos has given users 1GB for a fee of £3.49 per month. By contrast users of its free service get 10MB.
Mac users are not losing out either. Spymac is offering users 1GB of storage free and starting doing on on 5 April this year.
WEBMAIL FACTS
Gmail - 1GB storage, 10MB attachments
Hotmail Plus - $19.95 per year, 2GB storage, 20MB attachments
Hotmail free - 250MB storage, 10MB attachments
Yahoo Mail Plus - £11.99, 2GB storage, 10MB attachments
Yahoo Free - 100MB of storage, 10MB attachments
Lycos UK Personal - £41.88 per year, 1GB storage, 50MB attachments
Lycos UK - free, 10MB storage
Spymac - free, 1GB storage
Ask Jeeves - free, 250MB storage
Ask Jeeves Excite Gold - $19.99 per year, 2GB storage
Shiremail - £42 per year, 1GB storagePersonal I think its too late for M$ to come back now into the game . Its way behind others. I have already stopped using my Hotmail AccountSource :
Hotmail counters Google e-mail
