The Chaotic-Neutron

Most of you probably have read the news that Warren Buffet has given the Gates foundation over 32 billion $, around 80% of his wealth to help and improve the charity work the foundation is involved in. I am just overwhelmed by the beauty of the gesture, not just because it is 32b $ but primarily because of the fact that for someone in that position, giving out more than half the life’s earnings, an empire, away as donation needs a lot of understanding, benevolence and thought.

Some might argue that when somebody has 40b $ as assets, it should be easy to give away 32b $. But in my opinion, that is one of the best philanthropic action i’ve seen in my short life till now. I personally respect Gates for the huge effort and involvement in the foundation and all the support he has provided to eradicate diseases in the different third world countries. I am glad to see that someone is willing to spend time, money and effort to accomplish this when even the respective governments are having a hard time to stay afloat.

Kudos to Buffet for the thought and i pray that the Gates foundation will make an impact and improve the overall human lifestyle, all over the world !

Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles i’ve read on the news. Read on.

Warren Buffett, 75, known as the Oracle of Omaha for his stock-picking ability, is a quintessential capitalist and the world’s second-richest man. He’s also no fan of greed, or of inherited wealth.

Rather than pass on his $44 billion fortune to his adult children, whom he notes are already quite well-off, Buffett announced Sunday that he is giving away the bulk of his assets to a foundation run by his friends, Bill and Melinda Gates. This will double the $1.5 billion that the world’s richest foundation spends annually — mostly on health and education programs.

The gift is notable in several ways.

First, its sheer size. The donation makes industrialist benefactors such as John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie look almost stingy and is rivaled only by the Gateses’ own gifts of $25.9 billion. Calculating the impact that money might have is impossible, but neither Buffett nor the Gateses think small. “There’s no reason we can’t cure the world’s 20 deadliest illnesses,” Bill Gates said Monday.

They might.

The gift also underscores a little-noticed trend: a renaissance in philanthropy. In 2004, the latest year for which data exist, the USA had 70,000 foundations — double the number a decade earlier. They gave away $33 billion.

But perhaps most striking is the way Buffett’s decision stands out in this greed-is-good era, in which, to cite one example of gross excess, the average pay for top hedge-fund managers last year exceeded $360 million.

To a large degree, of course, wealth-building — if not outright greed — is good. Before they gave away a dime, Buffett and Gates created jobs and raised people’s living standards by building spectacularly successful companies. But when should the wealth-building stop?

“I don’t believe in dynastic wealth,” Buffett has said, likening inherited wealth to choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold medal winners in the 2000 Olympics. That’s why he opposes efforts to repeal the estate tax, saying that without it, America would have an aristocracy based on inherited wealth instead of a meritocracy that rewards ability and drive.

As Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, said in 1759 of generous capitalists, Buffett feels it’s in his self-interest to help others “though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” Here’s hoping others heed the message.

A few days earlier, me and some friends from my department were talking about the general driving system and specifically why the British chose to drive on the left while most of everyone in Europe and America drive on the right. We could not come up with any possible reason whatsoever to convince ourselves the necessity for such a discrepancy.

Now, accidentally, i came upon an article that solves the puzzle. The article answers the reason on why do the British drive on the left ?

Here’s the excerpt from the article that was relevant to the discussion i went through.

In the Middle Ages you kept to the left for the simple reason that you never knew who you’d meet on the road in those days. You wanted to make sure that a stranger passed on the right so you could go for your sword in case he proved unfriendly. This custom was given official sanction in 1300 AD, when Pope Boniface VIII invented the modern science of traffic control by declaring that pilgrims headed to Rome should keep left.

The papal system prevailed until the late 1700s, when teamsters in the United States and France began hauling farm products in big wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. These wagons had no driver’s seat. Instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team. Since you were sitting on the left, naturally you wanted everybody to pass on the left so you could look down and make sure you kept clear of the other guy’s wheels. Ergo, you kept to the right side of the road. The first known keep-right law in the U.S. was enacted in Pennsylvania in 1792, and in the ensuing years many states and Canadian provinces followed suit.

Cool isn’t it ?!

Here’s a nice piece of information that someone forwarded me recently, that i just couldn’t let go without posting here. This is about evidence of a strong telepathic connection between mothers and newborn babies, dogs and their owners, and identical twins. Here are a few real experiments that have been conducted to prove this ! Now read on.

Experiment 1

In 1997, the same polygraph expert supevised an experiment held in front of a live audience for a programme in Carlton TV’s Paranormal World of Paul McKenna series shown on 24th June. The subjects on this occasion were two very lively teenagers, Elaine and Evelyn Dove.

Elaine sat in the studio in front of a large pyramid put together by the special effects wizards, while Evelyn and Jeremy Barrett were in a separate room. When Elaine was nicely relaxed after some skilful light hypnosis from Paul McKenna, the pyramid exploded in a burst of sparks, flashes and coloured smoke, giving her a considerable shock. This showed up on Evelyn’s polygraph as a huge deflection – one pen running off the top of the paper, causing Barrett to comment over the intercom that “Evelyn certainly picked up something from somewhere.”

“There certainly was something coming,” he added, “and it looks to me like shock or surprise”. Interestingly, neither Evelyn Dove nor Richard Powles had any conscious awareness of the shocks their twins were being given although they were both unmistakably aware of them unconsciously.

Experiment 2

On January 10th 2003, 8-year-old Richard Powles sat in a soundproof room in a London television studio in front of a table on which there was a cardboard box and a plastic bucket filled with ice-cold water. On command, he rolled up his sleeve and plunged his arm into the near-freezing water, giving a gasp as he did so. In another studio well out of sight or earshot, his identical twin brother Damien was wired up to a four-channel polygraph (lie-detector) which, under the expert supervision of polygrapher Jeremy Barrett, was monitoring his respiration, abdominal muscles, pulse and galvanic skin response (sweat on the hands).

Neither he nor Barrett had any idea what was going on in the other room, although both knew they were taking part in a telepathy experiment to be shown later that day on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy chat show. All Damien had to do was sit quietly and “tune in” to his brother, while Barrett’s job was to watch the four pens as they woibbled along the paper chart and look out for something that shouldn’t be there.

He soon found it. At the exact moment of Richard’s sharp intake of breath caused by the freezing water, there was a sudden blip on the line monitoring Damien’s respiration rate. It was as though he too had gasped – which he hadn’t. The effect was so obvious that Barrett pointed to it with his thumb to indicate that he knew something had happened to Richard.

In another experiment, Richard was asked to open a cardboard box, which he did, hoping to find something nice – preferably eatable – in it. Instead, a huge rubber snake shot out of it at him, giving him a fright. This, too, was instantly picked up by his twin as the pulse line on the chart clearly indicated.

Was this visible proof of telepathy? Although this was not a rigidly controlled scientific experiment, it looked very much like it.

–Although the evidence for telepathy has been coming in regularly since the founding in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research -overall probability of chance in all of the published controlled experiments being of the order of one in billions – many remain unconvinced. Some refuse to admit even the possibility of telepathy, while more reasonable sceptics prefer to suspend judgment until there is not only unmistakable evidence for it and a theory explaining how it works.

I am still trying to find out the original source of this article but haven’t got my hands on that yet. Will see if i can dig more info by googling

Just came across a couple of cheesy game hacks to the free games that come with any of the windows operating system. Now i understand how someone in my lab managed to have the lowest time for the advanced mode in minesweeper. Damn you slackers and hackers.

Anyway, here are the Game cheats

FreeCell

Secret – Instant Win
Instructions – Hold down Ctrl + Shift + F10 during game play. Then you will be asked if you want to Abort, Retry or Ignore. Choose Abort, then move any card to instantly win.

Secret – Hidden Game Modes
Instructions – In the “Game” menu choose “Select Game”. Enter -1 or -2 to activate the hidden game modes.

Minesweeper

Secret – Reveal Mines
Instructions – Minimize or close all running applications. Launch Minesweeper, then type xyzzy. Next hold down either shift key for one second. Now when you move the mouse cursor over a Minesweeper square you will see a tiny white pixel in the top left corner of your desktop screen. This pixel will change to black when your mouse moves over a mine. You may need to change you desktop background to a solid color other then white or black to see the pixel.

Pinball

Secret – Extra Balls
Instructions – Type 1max at the start of a new ball to get extra balls.

Secret – Gravity Well
Instructions – Type gmax at the start of a new game to activate the Gravity Well.

Secret – Instant Promotion
Instructions – Type rmax at the start of a new game to go up in ranks.

Secret – Skill Shot
Instructions – Launch the ball partially up the chute past the third yellow light bar so it falls back down to get 75,000 points. There are six yellow light bars that are worth a varying amount of points:

First: 15,000 points
Second: 30,000 points
Third: 75,000 points
Fourth: 30,000 points
Fifth: 15,000 points
Sixth: 7,500 points

Secret – Test Mode
Instructions – Type hidden test at the start of a new ball to activate Test Mode. No notification will be given that this is activated but you can now left-click the mouse button and drag the ball around.

Secret – Unlimited Balls
Instructions – Type bmax at the start of a new ball. No notification will be given that this is activated but when a ball is lost a new ball will appear from the yellow wormhole indefinitely. Once this is activated you will be unable to activate other secrets without restarting the game.

Solitaire

Secret – Instant Win
Instructions – Press Alt + Shift + 2 during game play to instantly win.

Secret – Draw single cards in a Draw Three game
Instructions – Hold down CTRL + ALT + SHIFT while drawing a new card. Instead of drawing three cards you will only draw one.

– And there you have it. The info is not worth a dime but maybe you could use it to impress the nerdy girlfriend of yours !

I just read about a ‘All-in-One’ card which is so frickin cool. Here are some excerpts from the post.

This card would make mp3 players like iPod history and most PDA’s and cell phones look bulky and old. It is called “All-in-One Card” or AIO Card” (or Advanced Input Output Card) It has almost everything you need in a modern gadget and more.

AIO card is a thin client. It is like a remote display on a card over wireless. It means all its processing, and storage remains on a powerful server. It uses the same thin client technology found in Sun Rays. It only needs a small processor that does nothing but send the touch and other inputs to a server, and the server sends the display and sound back. Since all the storage is on a server, it gives you virtually unlimited storage for your data, pictures and songs. (unlikes iPods and mp3 players which have a limited memory)

– I think the idea is bloody cool and i might very definitely get one of these, if they become ubiquitous in the market. But then again, thinking about the current technological development, i am not really sure if such an advancement will ‘lift off’ from the ground. You need a strong wifi, a good bluetooth network, a stable server and a lot more to make this feasible, which make most of the comments in the post sensible. Amongst all these odds, if this guy’s idea does work, then Kudos to him and hello ‘All-in-One’ card !