Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr's personal diary, examined after his death, contains this entry about his meeting with Anandamayi Ma: “Met an Indian holy woman today. She asked me to explain quantum superposition. I did the observer effect, wave-particle duality, and the measurement problem. When I finished, she smiled and said, "So, your science has finally discovered what we've known for 5,000 years. Consciousness collapses possibility into actuality. The observer creates the observed. You are the universe observing itself."
Then she laughed. I couldn't speak. How did an uneducated village woman articulate in 30 seconds, what took me 30 years to understand?
A math professor noticed his kitchen sink at home was leaking.
He called a plumber.
The plumber came the next day, tightened a couple of nuts, and the sink worked perfectly again. The professor was delighted. But when, a minute later, the plumber handed him the bill, he was shocked.
“This is a third of my monthly salary!”
“Yeah, I get it…” said the plumber. “Why don’t you come work for our company as a plumber? You’ll make three times more than you do as a professor. Just remember: when you apply, say you only finished seventh grade. They don’t like hiring educated people.”
So the professor got a job as a plumber, and his life really did improve. All he had to do was tighten a nut here and there every so often, and his salary was much higher.
One day, the management of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to attend evening classes to finish eighth grade. So our professor had to go too.
By chance, the very first class was math.
The evening school teacher, wanting to check what the students knew, asked for the formula for the area of a circle.
They called the professor up to the board, and he suddenly realized he’d forgotten it. He started frantically reasoning it out, covering the board with integrals, differentials, and all sorts of fancy formulas to re-derive the result. In the end, he got:
S = –π r²
He didn’t like the minus sign, so he started again.
Again he got a minus. No matter what he did, it kept coming out negative.
He cast a panicked look at the class, and all the plumbers were whispering:
“Swap the limits of integration!”
Every time I see this kind of crap I want to know why there is a length limit on something you should never be transmitting or storing. Hashes don't get longer just because the input was longer. If you don't believe me, ask a cryptographer.
@melodaysong Watching the ocean, isnt that just like watching others art instead of working on my own skills? Inspirational, sure, but makes you wonder if you are really making use of all that inspiration.