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Oct
8
How to Call the Police When You are Old
Filed Under Fun Stuff | Leave a Comment
I received the following story through one of those typical email blasts – but this one did not say that I have to forward it if I don’t want to roast in hell. It is good enough to not need such encouragement. Without further ado…
George Phillips , an elderly man, from Meridian, Mississippi, was going up to bed, when his wife told him that he’d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. George opened the back door to go turn off the light, but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.
He phoned the police, who asked “Is someone in your house?”
He said “No, but some people are breaking into my garden shed and stealing from me.”
Then the police dispatcher said “All patrols are busy. You should lock your doors and an officer will be along when one is available.”
George said, “Okay.”
He hung up the phone and counted to 30.
Then he phoned the police again.
“Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now because I just shot them.” and he hung up.
Within five minutes, six Police Cars, a SWAT Team, a helicopter, two Fire Trucks, a Paramedic, and an Ambulance showed up at the Phillips’ residence, and caught the burglars red-handed.
One of the Policemen said to George, “I thought you said that you’d shot them!”
George said, “And I thought you said there was nobody available!”
I only remember once waiting for the cops after the alarm went off accidentally and I did not know how to handle this (new alarm!) It look about four hours that a squad car showed up and I remember contemplating the possibility that I REALLY needed them. Now I know what to do – beside being prepared to handle things myself the way George made the cops believe he had.
Oh, yes, do you know that the police, sheriff and cohorts do not have a duty to protect and help you?
Oct
2
The origin of the name Google – where it really comes from
Filed Under Educational, Fun Stuff, Thoughts | Leave a Comment
Have you ever wondered where Google got its name from. There are some of these companies that have become household names and nobody really considers any more where their names come from – Amazon, Yahoo, et al.
But somebody must have sad down and really thought about it. It is rare that something is materializing out of thin air. Often we get an inspiration from something that passes by – even if only fleeting.
Google, after being known around the world and even becoming a verb now could not possibly admit that its name would not reflect deep thought (pun intended) and consideration, so the official version is that Google comes from the mathematical term “googol”, to equal 10100, a number much larger than even the atoms in this universe.
But here I now have for you the real source of the name:
Today I re-read, for the xth time, Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and there it was – plain and simple:
In the story of this (must read) book where the two programmers Lunkwill and Fook talk to the computer Deep Thought the first time after its completion to find out if it will indeed be able to compute an easy answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything, and this computer classifies itself as only the second most powerful computer in the universe, the following dialog pursues:
“There must be a mistake,” he [Lunkwill] said, “are you not a greater computer than the Millard Gigantubrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?”
“The Millard Gigantubrain?” Said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. “A mere abacus – mention it not.”
“And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, ” a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabat Beta sand blizzard?”
“A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought laughingly. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.”
There you have it – modest Google does not (yet) compare itself with Deep Thought.
A little side note that other well know subjects have been inspired by Douglas Adams. Many of you will know the TIFF file format used to store image data. This format is a tagged format and one of the initial tags that identifies the file as a TIFF file has a value of 42 and the official comment was that this value was chosen for the deep meaning of this particular value. The drafters did not quite come out with the full credits for this value which took seven and a half million years to compute, but made this tongue in cheek choice for all those geeks who know TIFF and Douglas Adams.