Sayan’s BlogWorld

Tom Friedman’s new book is receiving rave reviews and stirring up controversy at the same time. The review itself is interesting can’t wait to get my hands on the book itself. I heard Friedman being interviewed by Larry King on CNN and it was fascinating… fascinating not because all he was talking about was new… instead he was just connecting known but disparate facts to show how globalization has become second-nature for the world. That said it will be interesting to hear a discussion between him and CK Prahalad.

This issue is reminiscent of the Pentium math bug / flaw [here and here] in the late 90s.

Are these the first steps towards self-replicating machines? Jugde for yourselves.

the robot’s creators say their experiment shows the ability to reproduce is not unique to biology…Their long-term plan is to design robots made from hundreds or thousands of identical basic modules…These could repair themselves if parts fail, reconfigure themselves to better perform the task they have been set, or even to make extra helpers.

Astronomers photographed a cosmic event this morning which they believe is the birth of a black hole…A faint visible-light flash moments after a high-energy gamma-ray burst likely heralds the merger of two dense neutron stars to create a relatively low-mass black hole, said Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It is the first time an optical counterpart to a very short-duration gamma-ray burst has ever been detected.

Motorola Labs today unveiled a working 5-inch color video display prototype based on proprietary Carbon Nanotube (CNT) technology – a breakthrough technique that could create large, flat panel displays with superior quality, longer lifetimes and lower costs than current offerings. Optimized for a large screen High Definition Television (HDTV) that is less than 1-inch thick, this first-of-its kind NED 5-inch prototype harnesses the power of CNTs to fundamentally change the design and fabrication of flat panel displays.

The world seems to have forgotten the sacrifices of the Indians during the World Wars. As this article says, the Indian Army at that time was the largest volunteer army- over two and a half million men. And along with the Americans and the British, served in all the fronts of the war. The Allied powers have a debt of gratitude to the India. But, the sad thing is that while most of the world remembers the men and women who sacrificed so much during the World Wars, they are forgotten in India.

Microsoft was already months into A massive project aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website and came across a help-wanted page with descriptions of all the open jobs at Google. Why, he wondered, were the qualifications for so many of them identical to Microsoft job specs?