21 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Guy Steele on Base Ten and Base Two

If I could change one thing—this is going to sound stupid—but if I could go back in time and change one thing, I might try to interest some early preliterate people in not ! using their thumbs when they count It could have been the Standard, and it would have made a whole lot of things easier in the modem era. On the other hand, we have learned a lot from the struggle with the incompatibility of base-ten with powers of two.
  1  notes

Our Base ten number system is the bane of computer scientists.

08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 The Samurai are Prohibited from Professional Sports

Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with this organisation of public sports. They did not sp...
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
Folksonomies: voluntary nobility
  2  notes

A professional athlete is an "athletic prostitute," and the Samurai do not participate.

03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 The Chance of Error in Atomic Sized Computers

The first thing that you would worry about when things get very small is Brownian motion--everything is shaking about and nothing stays in place. How can you control the circuits then? Furthermore, if a circuit does work, doesn't it now have a chance of accidentally jumping back? If we use two volts for the energy of this electric system, which is what we ordinarily use, that is eighty times the thermal energy at room temperature (kT=1/40 volt) and the chance that something jumps backward aga...
Folksonomies: computing physics
Folksonomies: computing physics
  1  notes

As things get very small we have to worry about brownian motion and quantum effects on the system.