Bharat Rakshak

adityaS

Amber G: Interesting, thank you. I will see if my discount bookstore has a copy of Plofker.

Here's a fairly old problem from the IMOs that is easy to state, but not so easy to solve:

Determine all pairs (a,b) of positive integers such that ab^2+b+7 divides a^2b+a+b.

adityaS

geeth wrote: I read somewhere that the infinite series was developed in Kerala in the 14th Century and that was the basis for Newton's invention of Calculus

Nilakantha did some wonderful work on astronomy, and though the pieces are definitely there, I don't think Calculus was explicitly developed.

adityaS

^^^ Isn't Walid Phares writing what seems to be the US aim in this whole mess? Drag India into the fighting, and withdraw slowly so that no one says too loudly that they've landed into what is almost Vietnam 2.0 . Other news articles: Article about the so-called "good" Taliban who have kid...

adityaS

Shahzad on the blasts: Al-Qaeda strikes back in Lahore However, the real trigger for the Lahore attack, planned by more than two Pakistani groups, was the recent clampdown on a major al-Qaeda sanctuary in Mohmand Agency. ... Al-Qaeda also has sanctuaries in Bajaur Agency, which, like Mohmand, border...

adityaS

Taliban stuck between anvil and hammer Article claims that avoiding guerilla warfare and taking control of provinces was a bad idea. One gem highlighted: In going on the offensive toward Islamabad, the TTP had to forego the advantages of insurgents and, to some extent, fight in a conventional manne...

adityaS

What is scary is that a lot of Indian syllabus still deals with outdated (and non-standard) tech. I get a lot of Indian fresh-out-of-college types who think Turbo-C 1.0 or 2.0 is the begin and end all for C compilers and can't understand why writing to a text segment causes a program crash in moder...

adityaS

Thanks ramanaji, brihaspatiji, NRaoji, Acharayaji, others for the earlier insights. About the blast: (Reuters does an interesting implication in the headline): U.N. seeks aid for Pakistanis; bomb kills six The United Nations launched an appeal on Friday for $543 million for more than 2 million peopl...

adityaS

SSridhar sir: right, that seems to be the reasoning to keeping the military tied in Swat. I still don't understand the plan to assassinate Kiyani. Even the most deluded jihadi would not risk the response on a rough plan that might well have failed, particularly since the person they were trying to k...

adityaS

Continuation of the earlier article on AlQ seeking a new alliance. The reporter has allegedly (I love this word) done an interview with some unnamed "top ideologue". The story is very interesting, if true: Al-Qaeda keeps its eyes on Afghanistan An al-Qaeda-linked cell led by veteran Kashmi...

adityaS

Interesting article: Al-Qaeda seeks a new alliance He said that al-Qaeda had already anticipated that Washington would bring Pakistan and India on board in the fight against militants, and even try to get cooperation from Iran. The aim would be to geographically isolate the militants. But the milita...

adityaS

Operation de-nuke, Kashmir-grab, castrate India & prop up TSP Typical: India should take the lead in initiating arms control talks with Pakistan and China. It should also declare its intention to stop producing nuclear weapons fuel (what is this saar?) , even before a proposed multinational tre...

adityaS

hmmm... perhaps Jagan can shed light on this. Polish fighter pilots maybe, quetta maybe, but dogfights over quetta? what is he talking about? Yes, that surprised me, too - the only reference I could quickly find was that there was a significant Polish refugee presence in India till the war ended. T...

adityaS

The article on the current fatwa declaring the IEDology of PakistaN Un-Islamic is here: Ulema term suicide attacks, beheading un-Islamic What does this mean? Rehman further said that practice to surrender before the gunpoint should end and urged a decisive offensive agains [sic] the militants. Are ...

adityaS

Bah, my mistake

The overcounting should have been obvious.

Shouldn't that be 89, btw?

adityaS

I'm not sure that answer is correct, because Amber says the first and last chairs have only one neighbour, rather than the chairs being in a circle. The 'how to solve it' is, I guess, to place 7 markers that divide the chairs into 7 groups of two (who can either sit in their own chairs, or swap), an...

adityaS

from Reuters: Yahoo to cut hundreds of jobs: source Yahoo Inc is preparing to lay off several hundred workers in the first round of cuts since Carol Bartz became chief executive in January, a source with knowledge of the situation told Reuters. The layoffs could be announced next Tuesday, when Yahoo...

adityaS

An interesting (if slightly slanted) take from the Asia Times on how our elections may affect the economy: The world's most important election By Martin Hutchinson There was a gradual easing of controls in the 1980s and a somewhat more vigorous one after 1991 under prime minister Narasimha Rao and h...

adityaS

ArmenT, I take it you've never had to "fix" template-heavy C++ code to work on older VC compilers?

Microsoft did clean up their act after VC2005, and VC2008 is really good. The intel compilers are better, but only if you're developing for intel chips.

adityaS

Saar, could you give me some pointers as to how to do this in FORTRAN. It's not like I can convince anyone in the office to change to FORTRAN, but I figure I'll learn about it in my spare time just because :D. Oddly enough, some places still do write high-performance code in fortran. Older netlib a...

adityaS

in the days of yore college campuses had no distractions - no internet, next to no girls (and those that existed were not good), no money, no pool parlors nearby, no bakeries/juice junctions to 'treat' girls to, a moth eaten movie hall maybe, bad food, no ethernet in rooms => no p0rn on tap, no tor...

adityaS

Gosh, it sucks to be stuck in an empty office on a long weekend.. Hey, but I get time to blog! :wink: . likewise ;) Man.. You guys have been brainwashed by all the database Oracle dudes.. Indexed files have existed forever in major platforms like IBM and DEC. Lets take a bet. You take the fastest T...

adityaS

^^ Okay, I deserved that one :) If you can reveal it, I'd be interested in knowing what are you building with the device, and the reasons to choose that particular microcontroller. 4k seems about right to put in a basic forth implementation to make writing things on top of it easier, but there are r...

adityaS

@merlin: real men use bits from /dev/random to write programs ;) And why should modern present day kids go back to fighting with sword when they have an assault rifle which sprays 40000000000 bullets a minute and also has an integrated laser pointer sight, which can hit bulls eye at 600 yards in a s...

adityaS

^^ just curious, does that terminal have internet access?

if nothing else, it is a good test to see if someone can search for code on the net.

adityaS

pgbhat wrote:You miss auto-completion/intellisense initially but gain tremendous understanding of the language .
JMT

vi(m) has autocompletion too, and I prefer that to IDEs - though some of the addons for VS look really useful.

adityaS

we are growing a generation of pansies. time to slap people around and wake them up. The current job market will take care of that more effectively than I perhaps want it to. As for the candidates from IITs and such, I believe that the really good ones run out of India to do their PhDs, and usually...

adityaS

The ballistic-missile-test-or-not debate is quite amusing. Guardian [...]the foreign secretary, David Miliband, described this morning's North Korean move as a "satellite launch". SCMP “Even if a satellite was launched, we see this as a ballistic missile test and we think this matter shoul...

adityaS

Nice one, ArmenT! The powers of 1 + sqrt(2): sqrt( 1 ) + sqrt(2) sqrt(8) + sqrt( 9 ) sqrt( 49 ) + sqrt(50) sqrt(288) + sqrt( 289 ) sqrt( 1681 ) + sqrt(1682) ... the sequence gives quite a few recurrence relations to calculate the lesser term (I didn't build a large enough table of differences to spo...

adityaS

And here I thought the jai to GvR was something like "the BDFL is retiring. Long live the BDFL!" for April 1 ;) Historically, extended-precision reals do come from fortran IIRC, so you're right. Your analysis of the problem, is of course, complete and correct in all respects. Let me try no...

adityaS

ArmenT, wouldn't using

Code: Select all

a[0]=11/2
a[1]=61/11

give the wrong results, even when, as you write, rational numbers are available? I think this problem was designed to show what happens if values are plugged in blindly to a formula. economic collapse, anyone?

adityaS

Amber G, exactly! Something like 140 digits of precision are required to avoid error propagation when this computation is repeated 100 times or so using floating-point numbers. Doing it by hand, or using rational numbers avoids this problem, of course. This is a sequence discovered by Jean-Michel Mu...

adityaS

All the talk about Fermat's theorem being "disproved" reminded me of this little curiosity - had quite a bit of trouble when I first saw this in college. Given the sequence: a[0] = 11/2 a[1] = 61/11 a[n+1] = 111 - (1130 - (3000 / a[n-1])) / a[n] It's possible to prove that this converges, ...

adityaS

ramana sir, from Reuters of Oct 2008

The pirates are said to be using MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense Systems) and rocket propelled grenades during their attacks. They also have GPS systems and satellite phones.

adityaS

probably OT, but does anyone else solve problems on Project Euler?

adityaS

sum: that's correct - depending on how you implement the LFSR, it should get "stuck" at either all 0's or all 1's - any other state means that the pattern generated has the longest period possible, which is because it basically transitions through all states in [1,2^n-1] . A different star...

adityaS

The optimal LFSR is a primitive polynomial of GF(2), are you looking for a proof of this, or a method to check whether a particular polynomial is primitive ? If I remember right (please check!), you need to prove that the polynomial divides x^(2^128-1)-1 . I assume you're been doing the autocorrelat...

adityaS

^^^ RM: thanks for the links to RUPE, it makes for interesting reading. The article on the economy is particularly good material for the Rhetoric and Dialectic thread.

adityaS

Kasab's Defence Essentially the claim is that the defence can argue that Kasab was on a trained army mission and hence is a prisoner of war. This argument does not hold water. Any enemy combatants who wage war without an official declaration of war by their country, or who wage war after declaratio...

adityaS

From an article about failed islamic states comes this gem: A final note: several readers have asked me to comment on the terror attack on Mumbai in November. I will do so with great caution, given the absence of accurate information. I have good reason to believe that the Indian authorities lied ab...

adityaS

ss_roy, Arnab, all: great posts, great gyaan.

Could you recommend reading material so that a beginner at economics can learn more (and hopefully understand better)?

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