After a dinner of pizza ( classified as 'junk', in case you wondered ), I came home and turned my computer on and launched a unix shell which promptly flashed the fortune cookie for the session that it does before it shows you a prompt (note:non-unix people, unix is like working within Windows, but always within command prompt (start-run-type cmd-enter ) and that too in full screen mode (atleast, the preferred way of better people everywhere, that is))
"What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working
when he's staring out the window."
and I said F*** yeah !! I agree totally. I was telling myself sometime back that I needed a 'study', so that things remain in the places I put them, and this ( importantly ) includes ideas.
Paul Graham has written an essay on why some people were not meant to have a boss, only he doesn't use the term 'some people' but addresses every reader. Being the latest in the line of inciting programmers to 'cast off their chains' and unite individually. Read that again. No mutual exclusivity laws have been violated.
Now I know atleast one person who has read PG's essays and has went and quit his job and has gone the startup way. Only time will tell if this was a good decision for him.
Galeej Gurus turn a year old or something like that . is what I gathered from the chatter on FM.
GoKikAss guys.
Now, for the staring-out-of-the-window-idea-of-the-day.
This
link is about how an old T.V lens ( a fresnel lens ) can focus sunlight so powerfully so as to fuse mud into glass in a matter of seconds.
I'm thinking that's an amazing bit of power. Should there be some poor smart chap sitting next to his perpetual motion machine apparatus unable to complete it because of the high cost of heating, this must be like the cavalry riding over the ridge, bugles sounding off and all.
Of course, once the perpetual motion machine is done, we are home safe, and oil can cost $2 Million a barrel and we wouldn't care and the skies would be clear and the whales would be safe and all.
Perpetual motion machines aren't all that fictional. I remember reading that if you insert a huge pipe into the depths of the ocean right past into the colder regions and then pump a bit of water out of that pipe, the hot water - cold water politics would keep the water flowing out of the pipe. Because of the cold water expanding as it touched the warm they said.
Atleast, this lens could be used to create a sea-water distilling device. No ?
I can see it already :
off a deserted coast, about a hundred metres into the water, floats a strange contraption. It is all glass and throws light off like a furious diamond, but floats on a base that's rubber, painted a shade of government-orange. Pipes run from it all the way to a small bunker on the shore and then they disappear into the ground. A lonely figure in khakhi cradles his huge ancient rifle and stirs from within the shade of the bunker roof. Beside him his stainless steel tiffin box contains the reddish brown remnants of his lunch, which is driving this pleasant drowsiness ...
That's me, always carried away and dreaming about sleep.
Watch this
video here and think about it.
