It seems like the developers of Civilization V once decided to store aggresiveness index of leaders in a unsigned int. And Gandhi, as the most pacifist leader that he was, was assigned lowest number 1. Also, in the game play if a society adopted democracy, the aggresiveness score was reduced by 2.

So, when Gandhi adopted democracy, his aggresiveness score became 1 - 2 = -1, and as it was unsigned int, and it gained a very high value.

#include<stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    unsigned int i;
    i = -1;
    printf("%x\n", i);
}

$ clang unsigned.c
$ ./a.out
4294967295

And thus Gandhi was ready to nuke whenever there is a conflict.

Looks like Google celebrated Subramanya Chandrasekhar's 107'th birthday with a doodle. I had missed it, so I got excited to go check it out again.

The doodle is amazing! It illustrates the concept of a star when it gains 1.4 times the mass of sun will turn into white-dwarf and eventually into a black-hole!

Chandrasekhar discovered this, and it is known as Chandrasekhar's limit.

This seems like a typical my-thing. I've fallen into this trap many times. It looks people in my profession fall prey to this too.

That’s one reason I don’t miss IT, because programmers are very unlikable people… In aviation, for example, people who greatly overestimate their level of skill are all dead.

• Philip Greenspun, co-founder of ArsDigita, excerpted from Founders at Work.

https://anders.com/blockchain/ is the simplest, and the intuitive explaination of blockchain that I come across until now. In the very short youtube video, author leads us starting from a hashing function, a block, the concept of signature in the block, then a blockchain, a distributed blockchain, the concept of immutablity in the blockchain and the distributed blockchain, recording transactions in the blockchain, and verifying transactions in the blockchain.

Some exciting learning here with this book. I learnt about the following:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1

• https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/cygnusx1.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_X-ray_Observatory

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schwarzschild

A billion years is some- times called an eon, so that we may say the Earth was formed 4.6 eons ago.

This is an inspiring short video. This is very relevant to me because in many projects, especially the big ones, I feel like the things are not designed well. The situation is chaotic, it's burning all the time. Most of us are like those big resourceful animals in this story. Instead, if we be the hummingbird, the experience is well worth it.

No matter how many times I read this story, it never gets boring to me. I finished reading a two part article on Microsoft and IBM PC history featured in Ars Technica UK.

• https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/

• https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-2/

If you are programmer working in this industry, go ahead and consume those pieces. You will turn out a bit more enlightened at the end.

Fundamentally, computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. - From a Ullman book.

Abstraction is not a complex concept. And abstraction in the sense we use it implies simplification, the replacement of a complex and detailed real-world situation by an understandable model within which we can solve a problem. That is, we “abstract away” the details whose effect on the solution to a problem is minimal or nonexistent, thereby creating a model that lets us deal with the essence of the problem.