Nine Hundred Ninety
Nine Billion, Nine Hundred and
Ninety Nine million …

I picked up the book HUMBLE Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by a Mr. Matt Parker.

Mr. Parker writes:

” … the amount of mathematics we use in our modern society both incredible and terrifying.

As a species, we have learned to explore and exploit mathematics to do things beyond what our brains can process naturally.

They allow us to achieve things well beyond what our internal hardware was designed for.

When we are operating beyond intuition we can do the most interesting things, but this is also where we are at our most vulnerable.

A simple maths mistake can slip by unnoticed but then have terrifying consequences.“

Mr. Parker tells how, when asked ‘How Big is One Trillion?’, he came up with the device of using seconds.

According to Mr. Parker:

One Million Seconds equals 11 days, 14 hours.

One Billion Seconds equals 31 YEARS.

One Trillion Seconds equals 310 CENTURIES or 31,000 YEARS/

That got me to thinking, would it take someone 31,000 year count to one trillion, by ones?

Then I said out loud – Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Billion, Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine million, Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine … One Trillion! – and I realized you can’t say those numbers in one second.

I guess its anybody’s guess how long that would take.

music, emotions
sounds that you hear what you feel
quiet city plays

I am in awe of the concept of music.

I was up early this morning. It was quiet. Gray outside, slowly getting brighter.

Quiet City by Aaron Copland was playing as I had my morning coffed.

The bond between the music, my emotions and my physical surroundings was surreal.

I do not understand how music like this is even thought up let alone written down.

How do Copland, Mozart and Ellington do that?

I was taken out of myself and this world for a few minutes of something beyond words.

Are there words? Maybe I don’t know them yet.

After almost 60 years maybe this is the best explanation for reading and wanting to read I have ever come up with.

My search for words.

As for the music. I can’t write it. I can’t play an instrument. I can enjoy it. Isn’t that enough.

As for moments like this, I don’t they can be planned, they can only happen.

This was came to end when my youngest son got up.

He can’t go through a doorway without slamming it.

He cannot take a shower without singing and whistling.

He cannot have breakfast with making a fruit smoothie with his rocket blender.

So much for quiet. But for a short time I was in my civilized world.

Clarence Day wrote, ” The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be a civilized man. After all, I had had a very light lunch, and I was tired and hungry. What with fingernails and improving books and dancing school, and sermons on Sundays, the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man got to eat were not worth it.”

Maybe not chocolate éclairs but the moment of this morning was worth it.

concerns network wise
ring topology spanning
the calamari

Based on an actual email I got while working out the problems adding a new machine to the corporate network.

Of the many concentrations in the Information Technology field, Network Architecture is truly the dark side.

So a programmer is on his way home from work and his wife asked to stop at a grocery store.

“Get a loaf a bread”, she said, “and if they have eggs, get a dozen.”

Programmer gets home, gets inside and says to his wife, “They had eggs”, and sets down 12 loaves of bread. (or is it 13?)