world e-book fair

http://www.worldebookfair.com is hosting a month long book fair. One can download some of the ebooks from there.

Fermat's last flight

Taken from a post by Steve Simmons (scs@iti.org) in alt.folklore.computers:

Some famous mathematician was to give a keynote speech at a conference. Asked for an advance summary, he said he would present a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem--but they should keep it under their hats. When he arrived, though, he spoke on a much more prosaic topic. Afterwards the conference organizers asked why he said he'd talk about the theorem and then didn't. He replied this was his standard practice, just in case he was killed on the way to the conference.

*****************

Current reading:

1. Scientific American
   
2. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
   

science and human feelings

A reader of "Time" writes:

"Science has ruined everything for lovers and poets. The moon is no longer the silver symbol of love, but a pockmarked ball of dust. And love? It is no longer a many splendored thing, but a slosh of dopamine over a caudate nucleus."

How true. Colors are nothing but light reflected from different surfaces with varying wavelength; intepreted by the human brain as colors. Too much of anything is bad. And science too qualifies as one of those 'anything'.