My Last Love

I should be over her by now.  I'm not.

Have you heard the expression . . .

"I don't know what to do with myself"?

Well, that describes me to a T.

Playing with i pi

We learn in math that e to the i pi equals -1.  [e in the base of the natural logarithim, i is the square root of minus 1, and pi is the ratio of the area of a circle to the radius squared.]  Squaring both sides gives e to the i pi squared equals 1.  Now e to the i pi squared equals e to the 2 i pi and 1 equals e to the 0.  Have I proven, falsely, that 2 i pi equals 0 so that i equals 0?  Actually not.  What I have proven (again falsely) is that 2 pi equals 0.  It's like saying that since sine of 2 pi equals sine of 0, then 2 pi equals 0.  And if you think in terms of angles, the angle 2 pi is the angle 0.  This is because sine of x is a cyclic function of x. Well, it turns out that e to the i x is also a cyclic function of x for e to the i x equals cos x plus i sin x.  In other words, it is a trigonomic function. 

I Was There

I bought a book today by David Weinberger titled "Too Big to Know" which seems to be of the "Oh, Wow!" genre.  He spent almost a page expounding on how big a number sextillion is.  What really caught my attention was "the most popular corporate computers of the 1950s the IBM 650.  With only only seventy-five of these machines installed anywhere . . . ."   "The 650 cost your company $500,000, equivalent to $4 million in 2011 dollars.  It's got its own room, its own fleet of maintenance folks, its own dress code:  white lab coats, please."  Well, I happened to be working with computers at an insurance company when we got our IBM 650.  "Only seventy-five" seems inconsistent with "most popular."  It didn't cost the company $500,000 because IBM didn't sell them, they leased them.  Ours didn't have its own room and the maintenance was by one IBM employee who wasn't there full time and as for white lab coats, nary a one.

There was a footnote:
5. Leonard Dudley, Information Revolution in the History of the West (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008), p. 266.