Thermal Noise

I’d interviewed a few folks on Python lately as a favor for a friend. Without laboring into details, there is one question that seems to baffle most candidates consistently. The first time I had to ask this question was because I couldn’t think of anything else “sane” at that point in time - and since the reaction by the (otherwise smart) candidate gave rise to a vicious notion of a entertainment, I kept repeating the question to every single person I interviewed subsequently !

Question: If the expression (0.99 - 0.90 - 0.09) were to be evaluated by the cpython interpreter, what would be the result ?

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One of my friends mourns that I write about technology and other obscure things that 99% of the world would not be interested in. He instead wants me to write more “personal stuff”. I wonder if that will worsen the ratio. Not that it is supposed to signify anything, but then for the heck of not disappointing Sid who threatens to “tag” me if I don’t ….

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Most of the books referenced from here are excellent.

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

Everytime once in a while, I wonder: [1] How would life be without the World Wide Web? [2] What would have Euclid done if he were here today ?

September had been a highly productive month. I ticked off 12 movies from my “Must Watch” list and completed five books. I tried finishing the Sixth - “A New Kind of Science” (NKS) by Stephen Wolfram but ran out of patience.

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My understanding and experimentation of bases other than the decimal number system is fairly rudimentary. I find it extra-ordinary that my friend Sid can perform arithmetic operations on binary, octal, hexadecimal and even trinary! number systems at an amazing speed inside is head. But it takes a true genius (No offence Sid), to invent something as wacky as a Quater Imaginary Base Number System !
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A couple of days back, I had a discussion with some CS students about Primality and Prime Number testing. They were bright kids and much to my surprise they had two fundamental misconceptions about Prime Numbers. One: They thought that there still does not exist any deterministic polynomial algorithm for primality testing. Two: They thought the existence of such an algorithm will lead to immediate breakdown of public key cryptography. I still remember the shock I had, when I read only last year that Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved in 1999. In the age of Internet I had somehow missed out on the news of one of humankind’s great intellectual accomplishments. But that was atleast explained by the fact that the Last Theorem is not a part of standard school or college text books and it was not quite that extra-ordinary that no one in college or school ever discussed about it. But Prime Numbers and a CS student is like bread and butter !
Anyway, I thought that was a good excuse to rant on the fascinating world of prime numbers.
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