The History Channel here in Israel had a “conspiracy theory weekend.” I’ve seen the ones on the assassination of Napoleon in St. Helen’s, Al-Qaeda and/or neo-nazi ties to Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing and the mind control of Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert Kennedy (search Google for more info.) A few days ago someone sent me a flash trailer for a new book claiming that not a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11, but a missile and describes the massive cover-up that ensued.

Conspircacy theories have charm because they are mysterious and appeal to our developed paranoia sense. For understandable reasons people are attracted to theories about government cover-ups. It is also hard for people to believe official — government sponsored — reasoning because they seem too simple. For example, Napoleon dying like a regular person from cancer, two unsophisticated southerners able to make a bomb out of acquirable chemicals to topple a 9 story building on its inhabitants and that JFK/RFK was killed by a lone gunman. Most defenders of the official story use this argument to debunk other theories; and sometimes they are pretty convincing.

I’d like to apply Occam’s Razor, but often, the contrary evidence make me believe the conspiracy theorists. I guess each theory needs to be evaluated on its own and we need to decide how plausible they seem. I learned long ago, from personal experience, that I will never know the truth, and what I know is very small portion of the truth. I’m not going to fight it or let it bother me as long as it doesn’t concern me directly.

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Watch this movie and count the number of passes the white team makes (you’ll need java enabled and it’s a fairly large file.)

Once you have seen the clip and counted the passes, click on comments below; only AFTER you have a count. The answer will shock you!

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I find that examining a techinical book’s index is the most effective and quickest way for evaluating its quality. When I am looking for a book on a certain topic in the bookstore or library, I immidiately go to the index. I rarely look at the contents or bibiliography sections. If the author or publisher skimmed on the index, I move to the next book. Sometimes you find books with very little entries in the index, and that is just unacceptable. There is no excuse for a skinny indexes; the publishing software does it for free. The books just become unusable as a reference. If the index is more substantial, I look for a few keywords that I am interested in; if they are not there, I move on.

I developed this method after using the index in “The Art of Electronics” by Horowitz and Hill. I fondly call it “The Bible” (Gods, please make a 3rd edition.) I refer to it several times a week, even though it is alomst 15 years old! It has the most extensive and useful index I have ever seen AND it is the best technical reference book I have laid my hands on. So there’s the connection: good index is the first clue for a good tech book!

However, don’t judge a book only by its index. For example, Howard Johnson’s and Martin Graham’s”High Speed Digital Design” is an excellent reference book but, sadly, with a mediocure index section.

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I upgraded to WP 1.5.
Suuuuuper easy.
For now, I am going to stick with the default theme, because I think it looks pretty good. If I was a better CSS hack, I’d change it to something like what this guy did… nice, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll personalize some graphics as I get more traffic :)

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slashdot is a great thing; I monitor it daily because it really picks up on the worthwhile geek stuff (…that matters.) Typically, I follow up on 2-3 digests a day and read some of the comments which are in majority either insightful, cynical or hilarious.

Today (comments) it linked to Paul Graham’s “How to Start a Startup” version of a lecture he previously gave. It is insightful, well written and definately worth the read. I’ve always wanted a company of my own, and always knew that the right time will come. It will. Hopefully soon, I’m ready!

Anyone has an idea for a better mouse trap? call me.

Also, don’t miss Allen Morgan’s weblog where he chronicles the Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs (he’s a VC… so it’s good to understand his perspective on things even if you disagree with it.) And, check out Steve Friedl’s So you want to be a consultant…?; great stuff.

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Ever since I created my webpage www.saardrimer.com, I’ve been searching for my name on all the search engines to see if they “caught” the site and of course what rank I am getting. So I thought of creating a “search all” page where you enter the string only once and it opens a new window with the results for each of the search engines selected. Pretty simple, so give it a shot.

Oh, don’t forget to press CNTRL to disable your popup blocker… and, “HaKol” means “everything” in Hebrew. Enjoy.

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I’ve started this weblog a few weeks ago knowing that only a handful of people would actually read it (after I condition my friendship to that, of course.) Then, I posted my previous remarks regarding the paris hilton “tragedy” and what do you know… got a considerable amount of traffic. Actually, if you search for “paris hilton contacts” on yahoo, I’m no. 12!
I’d really hate for my name to even be remotely associated with that airhead, but who cares, really?

So I learned a few things from this:
1. timing is everything. had I have written the post a day later, I would have gotten zip.
2. people do not leave comments (I got none); or alternatively, people saw that there are no steamy pictures or a list of celebrity contacts and left without reading a word. I prefer to think that they did read my witty post, so don’t burst my bubble.
3. celebrity bashing is fun. apparently,it’s very popular too.

btw, would it kill anyone to leave some comments?
arg.

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Today was the second and final day of a class that was offered at Xilinx on “Asynchronous VLSI Design.” It was give by Dr. Ran Ginosar from the Technion in Israel. The class was excellent and I learned a lot (although it did start quite early, by my standards… but there were plenty of caffeinated drinks available.)
The topic got me thinking about life, is it asynch or synch? Obviously its asynch, but we must “synch-in” many times throughout the day. Actually, we synch every time we look at out watch, or any other clock; furthermore, we are synching to familiar timely events. For example, when I hear the cart of fresh coffee pass by my cube in the morning (contrary to what it may seem, I’m more of a tea drinker, but this was a good example.) However, our life is a continuous chain of random and asynch events.

Think of the new email popping into the mailbox, someone breaking on the way home or the surprise phone call informing you were just promoted. Most events in our life are asynch; even the whimsical decision to go bowling. So why do we need clocks for? To synchronize with other people.

Imagine a world comprised of a single person, would she need a watch? No. There’s really no point for a universal synch because she needs to synch only with herself; no one is waiting for her at 8am sharp for a seminar.

So our life is asynchronous, but we must universally synchronize it in order to live with others.

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This is by far my favorite topic to read about or research. A nice article on the topic appeared on securityfocus.com. Unfortunately, it did not even mention the only book (that I know of) that deals solely with this issue in a serious manner. Anyway, I’m glad people are giving it some thought and that we’ll start thinking ahead to account for the unintended consequences.

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OK. for some reason I tried to be a perfectionist with this weblog (I just hate the term ‘blog’) and it took me a while to get it right and to my satisfaction. I took a template from alexking.org’s template contest; I chose “gutenberg” and editted it a little. I also learned CSS in the process and did everything “by hand,” so that’s cool.

I hope you enjoy this weblog as long as it last…

cheers.

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