Back when I was younger, I literally taught the course on decentralization at university. We didn’t call it that, of course, because we were not trying to sell a ponzi scheme, but it meant that every year, I’d have 100 or thereabouts students up for oral exam in distributed algorithms and the like. I had […]
There’s this old joke/riddle/maths puzzle: an algae is spreading in a lake so that every night, the covered area doubles. After 10 weeks, 70 days, the lake is fully covered. After how many days was the lake halfway covered? The correct answer is, of course (but very counter-intuitively), that it is half-covered after 69 days […]
Let’s talk about large numbers, why don’t we? Have you ever thought of what the largest number is? 7? 19? 21 perhaps? The computer scientists might smugly insist on 1 and a couple nerds out there will try to say 42 while laughing at themselves and thinking to themselves how clever they are for out-nerding […]