The Business Experiment

This Business Experiment got initially attracted me but I immediately realized why it would bring only an average or below average results. This experiment basically wants to try running a startup by votes from the people. The idea is to harness "wisdom of the crowds". I think, the smartness factor would be averaged out in this system instead of "more than sum of its parts". It's blind one-shot voting after all; not a structured logical argument going in the crowed which could otherwise have made difference. Other way to look at it is that such business is already in existence which is virtually run by voting and belief system of crowd: government! It may be fairly robust and may be sufficiently stable over centuries of existence but its the most inefficient business that we know of.

Google Indexing Leg

This is different for different websites but it took Google 24 days to index my last blog entry!

Finally Runs Even If Method Returns!


using (DisTest o = new DisTest())
{
        return;
}


OR


Dim o As DisTest = New DisTest
Try            
        Return        
Finally
         o.Dispose()
End Try


Interesting Headers

The response headers returns with Google's logo looks like this:

Content-Type: image/gif
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 21:06:18 GMT
Expires: Sun, 17 Jan 2038 19:14:07 GMT
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 8558
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:52:05 GMT


And for some gif served by IIS on Win 2003 Server looks like this:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 02:08:59 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 09:12:29 GMT
Etag: "20bb944a9a20c51:acc"
Content-Length: 3779


You can get this by using Web Developer Toolbar's Information > Reponse Header button in Firefox.

Interesting things are:

1. Google is not using Cache-Control: max-age=xxxx header which tells browser to cach the image for a while and not re-request from the server again. This is surprising because you would think Google would use every possible way out there to reduce the load on their server.


2. Google has named their custom web server as Google Web Server, not surprisingly.

Types Of Database Columns

From an excellent article on Decimal mentions survey of 1,091,916 columns in databases owned by 41 organizations to find that 41.8% of them contained numeric data and 53.7% contained char data.

Chinese As a Second Languge

Dumping popular French and Spanish and taking Chinese [2 minute video - IE only] in schools is such a cool idea.

[via A VC]

Pavlov's Dog

BNL certainly has some scientific lyrics. The "Pavlov's dog" mentioned in Brian Wilson is about the classic experiment conducted by Pavlov in 1900s to show that dogs can learn to associate ringing of bell to the arrival of food and keep salivate even if you stop giving food.

On another note, "Nine-point-eight straight down" in When I Fall is the Earth's gravitational constant g when an object freely falls.

There aren't possibly better ways writing about science experiments in more artistic ways in mainstream songs ;)

Really Slick Screensavers

These are some of the best screensavers I've seen anywhere. Check out especially skyrocket which is extremely cool simulation of fireworks with randomly moving camera in 3D space and also Helios. Too bad I can't use them because I've donated my free computer time to World Community Grid to compute protein folding :(.

We are Finite State Machines

From the coolest UML tutorial:

Systems that have a fixed number
of states, and that respond to a fixed set of events are called finite state machines (FSM).

The book "Birth of the Mind" says DNA is nothing like conventional computers. It is FSM.