A Quantum Immortal

I had wondered of we all use Google because it is objectively better or because we are used to it being better all this time. Maybe Yahoo and MSN had improved since we decided to switch to Google?

Here, try this search on MetaCrawler. Only Google finds this page. Google has the benefit that it owns Blogger and can possibly get easier access to its database, but still that hardly justifies as an excuse for the other search engines – the post being searched is over a month old!

I encourage you to read Eli’s review of the new Blackout restaurant in old Jaffa (יפו) – it’s a restaurant with absolutely no light – it’s absolutely dark and you can’t see anything, similar to Dialog in the Dark in Holon’s Children Museum. I didn’t visit Blackout (at 140 NIS per person it’s quite expensive for my taste), but it sounds like a cool experience. The tour in Dialog in the Dark also contains a “restaurant” with only drinks and snacks, but it was still a great experience. You pay with coins and are amazed how the blind bartender figures out how much you’ve payed.

As a new music creator surfaces, his few fans just buy his records. Then, at some point, someone puts it on some file-sharing network and only people that actually believe in paying for music do.

Now that the formalities are over, like Tomer and Shlomo, I can now announce I’ll be joining Delver (A.K.A Semingo) on April 1st. Delver is a startup building a social search engine, that will allow you to find information based on your social network.

Starting April I will be in Herzliya daily, and will move back to the center around May.

If you’re interested, you can about us at Techchrunch, register for the private beta or watch our CEO Liad previews Delver at a demo conference.

Oo, and for some reason this next image, which is the first Google Images result for “delver” was blocked by SafeSearch (Google’s adult images filtering), and only showed up when I disabled it. Weird.

UPDATE:
Fix broken link to Delver, thanks Sagie.

From Wikipedia

Benardete’s paradox

While not strictly a supertask, this idea has inspired many papers about supertasks. A man called Prometheus angers Zeus, so Zeus gathers an infinite number of demons and issues them with the following commands. Demon 1: if Prometheus is not dead in one hour kill him, Demon 2: if Prometheus is not dead in half an hour kill him, Demon 3: if Prometheus is not dead in quarter of an hour kill him, and so on. As it turns out Prometheus was dead within the hour (as he didn’t really have much chance). The council of gods was not happy about this and pressed Zeus on the point. But none of his demons could be found guilty, as, for each positive integer n, it was not possible for the nth demon to have killed Prometheus because the (n + 1) th demon should already have done so. Similar paradoxes involving a man trying to walk a mile from A to B but the demons building a wall in front of him if he reaches 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, … of a mile past A, so he hits some sort of invisible barrier when he reaches A even though no wall has been built.

What makes Google the best, according to Google.

How IBM is filing for a silly patent.

How to make your plants call you or update their Twitter status when they need water.

And finally:

I tend to write short stories from time to time, when I get the muse.
I opened a short page that I will use to host some of those stories.
Here is the first one, Reading Dracula.

BTW, you can use Google Page Creator for creating & hosting short webpages like this one and even hosting files up to 100mb.

This is new to me – it appears that in addition to the usual spell-checking and sentence structure checks Word 2007 does, it also includes a political correctness checker. Check this out: