On Search Engines

it all started as a lame chat with one of my friends about hard disk caches, i first read about that months ago and i just told him that these caches are flash non-volatile memories, then i wanted to make sure what i said was right, so i had to search the web, Google led me here, and i copied him the couple of paragraphs that showed my evidence and everyone was happy,

then, i asked myself what would happen if i asked Google to fined those paragraphs for me again, this led me to another question: how much can i put into the Google search box, using my firebug i inspected the box element and i found a maxlength of 2048 which was more than pleasing to me, i proceeded with my test and was happy with the single match result that only contained the source page, no one can ask for more...

then i wanted to know what would happen if i repeated my little experiment with other search engines too, so, i did the same with Yahoo (no maxlength declared) , and the source page came on top of a list of seven matches, not bad at all, then i turned to msn (maxlength of 250) and it just didn't like my search key and returned: "We did not find any results for: ..."

i don't know why this happened and i was curious to know how each search engine worked as i already knew about Page Rank and the Google stuff, so back to Google, i typed "how yah.." and the suggest came with "how yahoo works" which was exactly what i wanted, i ended with that interesting article, by Danny Sullivan, i hope i have the time to read it soon,

Mathematical Beauty

i believe mathematics is really beautiful, you only need to be shown that beauty if you can't see it for yourself. few gifted ones have the talent and inspiration to expose this beauty for all to see.

Douglas Arnold and Jonathan created a fascinating 3D animation that "depicts the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity. It was one of the winners in the 2007 Science and Visualization Challenge and was featured along with the other winning entries in the September 28, 2007 issue of journal Science. The video, which was first released on YouTube in June 2007, has been watched there by more than a million viewers and classified as a "Top Favorite of All Time" in the Film & Animation category." copied from the project home page.

you can watch the movie here on YouTube.

classical music for free

i was so happy to learn about free music websites where you can listen to and download very fine pieces of music. i have always been a fan of classical music as i used to listen to the "Musical Program" on the FM few years ago. among the different flavors of classical music i'd like to mention baroque guitar, very deep and expressive.

i want to thank the people who worked for bringing us these fine pieces of art for free.

musicbakery and musopen are the websites i visited so far.

two different trends i think, musicbakery offer samples and you pay for the whole piece while musopen is all about free music that's available to everybody everywhere. musopen also provides good info about the pieces and the composers, this adds some glamor to the musical experience.

i recommend "Festive Classical" and "Baroque Guitar" on musicbakery, currently i'm exploring musopen, i found some piano concerts for Rachmaninoff and Beethoven which i think will be just great.