Fascinating. My Erdős number is 4. According to wikipedia, the median Erdős number amongst all working mathematicians at the turn of the millennium is 5 and the average is 4.64. In this case, being below average is good. Here is how it happened: Paul Erdös coauthored with Janos Galambos who coauthored with Eugene Seneta who coauthored with Serge Dubuc (my thesis cosupervisor).

As promised, here are some Halloween videos of my two sons!

You may want to compare with how Lohan looked two years ago:

They do grow up, don’t they?

(To those who object that the picture is dark and the color not very rich: I do these videos with a very simple camera. I will buy something better before I turn pro. Do not worry.)

Very interesting post by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

I say this as one of the few people in the world who spent a year building an XHTML/XML web site: it ain’t worth it. As long as XHTML is the end product, and as long as browsers don’t care too much what you feed them, then XHTML does not and will not matter.

I always assumed that XHTML would find applications as a data source, but alas, it is not and will never be a good data source. I will keep on producing valid XHTML code whenever convenient, because working with XHTML is just better than working with tag soup, but there other formats, such as HTML 4.0, which are better than tag soup.

A colleague of mine, a Ph.D. in Physics, objected to my use of the term “infinite storage” in some lecture notes I posted on the Web.

I think that infinite storage is something that might be possible in my lifetime. What does “infinite storage” means? Let us consider how much is required to achieve the mythical (digital) memex.

• To record everything you read in a year requires 25MB.
• To record everything you hear in a year requires 100GB.
• To record everything you see in a year requires 10TB.

Hence, I argue that whenever I will be able to buy a cheap 10TB disk at my local electronics store, I will have infinite storage. Currently a portable 1TB drive can be had for $569.

What about recording everything I hear? Right now, I can buy a slick 100GB portable drive for $160.

Interesting question: how would I ever search through all these sounds?

And what about all these people who will get upset that I am recording them?

(Reference: Jim Gray, What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals, Journal of the ACM, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2003.)

Sharing slides and white boards on the web ought to be free, multiplatform, and easy. We have used the Java-based
webhuddle with quite a lot of success. Now comes along Vyew which is the Web 2.0 equivalent of webhuddle.

(Source: Harold Jarche)