Udo Gollub summarized his impressions from visiting Singularity University summit in Berlin on April 20-21, 2016 and posted them on Facebook. The presenters on the summit (and Udo) try to look into the future. They made many very specific predictions. I liked and could relate to several of them, so here I reprint some of […]
Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Peter Principle: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out […]
Origin of the difference in the nation wealth. Why some of the nations live better than others? The prosperous ones just happened to get the good start in more favorable circumstances.
Leo Tolstoy Ecologist Dwayne Moore wrote in his article “The Principle Applied to Ecological Risk Assessments of Multiple Stressors”, published in 2001: “Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every […]
Our planet and solar system belong to Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across with a supermassive black hole in the center. Average distance between stars is 5 light years (29 trillion miles) approximately. Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 mln miles, or about 8 light minutes) is […]
There are many outstanding individuals, who have done for humanity much more than Olympic gold winners and many entertainment celebrities, but the wider public does not know their names. I have written already about Bartini. Today, I would like to honor three mathematicians. I learned about them accidentally and was impressed by their lives and […]
When I was a student in Moscow, with my friends, we often listen music in the Grand Hall of Moscow Conservatory or in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. The advantage of the first one was an occasional chance to slip past the ticket booth, pretending to be a student of the conservatory (all student IDs looked […]
Americans and Russians are very similar – much more similar than any other two nations I was able to observe. Why? After living in the USSR and then in the US for a long time, I see a few reasons for that.
The first game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue, beat the reigning chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. There was some controversy around the match, but, after the event, Kasparov realized that he might have performed better if he’d had, as Deep Blue did, […]
The last shroud of mystery around Stonehenge was taken down for me after I had read about recent discoveries about the origin of the bluestones and the idea of building Stonehenge, its purpose, and relatively young age if compared to Göbekli Tepe.