ramesh was here

Felix Dennis: Consider carefully this shortlist:

• If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand little chance of ever getting rich.
  
• If you care what the neighbours think, you will never get rich.
  
• If you cannot bear the thought of causing worry to your family, spouse or lover while you plough a lonely, dangerous road rather than taking the safe option of a regular job, you will never get rich.
  
• If you have artistic inclinations and fear that the search for wealth will coarsen such talents, you will never get rich. (Because your fear, in this instance, is well justified.)
  
• If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.
  
• If you cannot convince yourself that you are “good enough” to be rich, you will never get rich.
  
• If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich.
  
• If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich.
  

In 1851, Herbert Spencer Wrote:

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race. You may put men on opposite sides of a river or a chain of mountains; may else part them by a tract of salt water; may give them, if you like, distinct languages; and may even colour their skins differently; but you cannot change their fundamental relationships. Originating as these do in the facts of man’s constitution, they are unalterable by the accidents of external condition. The moral law is cosmopolite – is no respecter of nationalities: and between men who are the antipodes of each other, either in locality or anything else, there must still exist the same balance of rights as though they were next-door neighbours in all things.

- Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, Part III.

Wikipedia:

The earliest recorded statements of combinatorical rules appear in India. The medical treatise Sushruta Samhita written by Sushruta in the 6th century BC states that 63 combinations can be made out of six different tastes – bitter, sour, salty, sweet, astringent, and hot – by taking them one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, etc. In other words, there are 6 single tastes, 15 combinations of two, 20 combinations of three, etc. The Bhagabati Sutra, written by a Jaina mathematician circa 300 BC, contains rules on combinations and permutations corresponding to





and





Numbers are calculated in the cases where n = 2, 3 and 4. The author then says that one can compute the numbers in the same way for larger n: 'In this way, 5, 6, 7, ..., 10, etc. or an enumerable, unenumerable or infinite number of things may be specified. Taking one at a time, two at a time, ... ten at a time, as the number of combinations are formed they must all be worked out." This suggests that the arithmetic can be extended to various infinite numbers. The relation of the number of combinations to the coefficients occurring in the binomial expansion was noted by Pingala in the 3rd century BC in a musical composition. He gave the different combinations of guru and laghu sounds as a meru-prastara (Pascal's triangle) and gave a rule simpler than that of Blaise Pascal, based on the simple formula



Varahamihira in the 6th century CE states that "if a quantity of 16 substances is varied in four different ways, the result will be 1820." He found this result using rules related to Pascal's triangle. In the 9th century, Mahavira gave an explicit algorithm for calculating the number of combinations and provided the well-known general formula

Wikipedia:

IDL programming language, a commercial interpreted language based on FORTRAN with some vectorization. Widely used in the solar physics and medical communities. A free alternative is available:

GNU data language, a free compiler designed as a drop-in replacement for IDL.

IMTEK Mathematica Supplement is an open source (GNU GPL license) collection of tutorials and packages for numerical calculations.

JScience, an open-source (multiple licenses) Java API for performing numerical calculations and data storage among other things.

LabVIEW offers both textual and graphical programming approaches to numerical analysis.

Mathcad offers a WYSIWYG interface and the ability to generate publication-quality mathematical equations.

MATLAB is a widely-used program for performing numerical calculations. It comes with its own programming language, in which numerical algorithms can be implemented. Several programs use a similar syntax

FreeMat, an open-source MATLAB-like environment with a GPL license

GNU Octave can generally run scripts written for recent version of MATLAB; has an active user community. (free software, GNU GPL license)

Rlab is another free software program which bears a strong resemblance to MATLAB. Rlab development ceased for several years but it was revived as RlabPlus.

Scilab is distributed with source (under their own license, which isn't approved by the Open Source Initiative)

Perl Data Language, also known as PDL, an array extension to Perl ver.5, used for data manipulation, statistics, numerical simulation and visualization.

R programming language is a widely used system with a focus on data manipulation and statistics. Several hundred freely downloadable specialized packages are available (free software, GNU GPL license).

XNUMBERS — Multi Precision Floating Point Computing and Numerical Methods for EXCEL.

Group for User Interface Research:

Speech-based user interfaces are growing in popularity. Unfortunately, the technology expertise required to build speech UIs precludes many individuals from participating in the speech interface design process. Furthermore, the time and knowledge costs of building even simple speech systems make it difficult for designers to iteratively design speech UIs. We have developed SUEDE, a speech interface prototyping tool allowing designers to rapidly create prompt/response speech interfaces. It offers an electronically supported Wizard of Oz (WOz) technique that captures test data, allowing designers to analyze the interface after testing. This informal tool enables user interface designers, even non-experts, to quickly create, test, and analyze speech UI prototypes.

The history of Sudoku:

If you had to imagine the history of Sudoku, what would it be? A hardened Samurai etching numbers into a knarled lilac tree with the tip of his sword to relax before battle? An ancient old sensei in a beautiful zen garden, marking characters on a scroll of parchment before relaxing under a bonsai tree?