I used to be addicted to blogging. Blogging made me spend a lot of time browsing around the blogs on the internet, made new friends, found out how to create a good and interesting kind of blog, how to put traffic to the blog and be happy to see when people come across to my blog and visit for a look or comment. These blogging activities had led me to a popular website called digg.com or say “Digg”. Digg is a website for people to share links content resources (e.g., pictures, movies, documents, stories, web pages) on the Internet and put it into a particular keyword or “tag”. Not only that, Digg also allows registered users to use two unique things, digging or burying facility while commenting. Dig simply means users put one point up to the posting and burry means not to vote, the more dig points or dugg Continue reading ‘Social Tagging’
Archive for the 'A word or two' Category
The word “algorithm”? is quite interesting; at first glance it may look as though someone intended to write “logarithm” but jumble up the first four letters. The word did not appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary as late as 1975; we found only the older form “algorism” with this ancient meaning, the process of doing arithmetic using Arabic numerals. During the Middle Ages, abacists computed on the abacus and algorists computed by algorism. By the time of the Renaissance, the origin of this word was in doubt, and early linguists attempted to guess at its derivation by making combinations like algiros [painful]+arithmos [number]; others said no, the word comes from “King Algor of Castile.” Finally, historians of mathematics found the true origin of the word algorism: It comes from the name of a famous Persian textbook author, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi — literally, “Father of Abdullah, Mohammed, son of Moses, native of Khawarizm.” The Aral sea in Central Asia was once known as Lake Khawarizm, and the Khawarizm region is located in the Amu River basin just south of that sea. Al-Khawarizmi wrote the celebrated Arabic text Kitab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala (“Rules of restoring and equating”); another word, “algebra,” stems from the title of that book, which was a systematic study of the solution of linear and quadratic equations. [For notes on al-Khwarizmi's life and work, see H. Zemanek, Lecture in Computer Science 122 (1981, 1-81.]
Gradually the form and meaning of algorism became corrupted; as explained by the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “passed through many pseudo-etymological perversions, including a recent algorithm, in which it is learnedly confused” with Greek root of the word arithmetic. This change from “algorism” to “algorithm” is not hard to understand in view of the fact that people had forgotten the original derivation of the word. An early German mathematical dictionary, Vollstandiges mathematisches Lexicon: “(Leipzig: 1774), gave the following definition for the word Algorithmus: “Under this designation are combined the notions of the four types of arithmetic calculations, namely addition, multiplication, substraction, and division.” The Latin phrase algorithmus infinitesimalis was at that time used to denote “ways of calculation with infinitely small quantities, as invented by Leibniz.
By 1950, the word algorithm was most frequently associated with Euclid’s algorithm, a process for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers that appears in Euclid’s Elements (Book 7, Propositions 1 and 2).
[Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, volume 1, 2007]
On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs delivered a speech on a graduation ceremony in Stanford University. It is the best speech that I’ve ever read in my life.
Below is the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs.
…
“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
After floating around a bit a while to find a better place to sit my bump on. Finally, found it! It is kinda cool place to put my brain on rest after mucking around with fuzzy stuff back there in the lab during the day. Well, welcome for you all, the world wide strangers, here to my sloppy blog. Let’s share and innovate.
Cheers.
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