It wasn't just the Incas who failed to invent the wheel; every other civilization in the New World (with one exception, which we'll get to in a minute) managed to overlook it as well. For that matter, the ancient Americans also had to struggle along without the true arch, the cart, the plow, the potter's wheel, the bellows, glass, iron, and stringed instruments. But it's unfair to attribute this sorry technological record to either lack of IQ or (as far as the wheel was concerned) an infatuation with transport via brute strength. The fact is that most civilizations in the Old World didn't invent the wheel either--instead, they borrowed it from some other culture. The wheel appears to have been first used in Sumer in the Middle East around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It didn't arrive in Britain until 500 BC. This orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted individual--an individual, however, who was such a dope that he failed to sign his name on the patent application, thus assuring his (or her) eternal anonymity. We might therefore attribute Inca wheellessness to the absence of a pre-Columbian Thomas Edison.

The idea here is that most of us should already know most of what is on this list. But there just might be one or two items you havent really looked into before, dont fully understand, or maybe never even heard of.

Batteries Feel Included is a condition that a man can develop when he is very lonely and struggling to connect with society. It is a period in his life when he feels so alone that even batteries, an object famed for not being included, appear to be more included than him.

Convinced from spending hours reading rave reviews, Bob eagerly clicked "Proceed to Checkout" for his gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk and...

Whoa! What just happened?

In the 220 milliseconds that flew by, a lot of interesting stuff happened to make Firefox change the address bar color and put a lock in the lower right corner. With the help of Wireshark, my favorite network tool, and a slightly modified debug build of Firefox, we can see exactly what's going on.

I have a friend who quits smoking every 6 months.

I know people who write blog posts like "I have not been writing much lately" every other month.

Correcting yourself is good, but don't make it a habit. Don't make the same mistake twice. Sorry is genuine only once.

The Fibonacci series is a famous example of an object with a simple mathematical description, but a nearly inexhaustable list of bizarre and complicated properties. Originally, the series was described by Fibonacci in the 15th century in connection with the following problem:

Assume that a pair of rabbits will breed another pair of rabbits every month of their lives, after sexual maturity. Assume also that rabbits become sexually mature after two months. Starting with one newborn pair of rabbits, describe how many rabbits you get in successive months.

At the end of the first month you have 1 pair. After another month, you still have 1 pair. However, at the end of the third, the first pair has become sexually mature, and produced offspring, so you have 2 pair. At the end of the next month, the first pair reporduces again, while the second pair remains immature, so you have a total of 3 pair.

We have a blog to document the developments in the voidy world. Stay tuned!

That 32-bit editions of Windows Vista are limited to 4GB is not because of any physical or technical constraint on 32-bit operating systems. The 32-bit editions of Windows Vista all contain code for using physical memory above 4GB. Microsoft just doesn’t license you to use that code.

A promise is not to break.
A secret is not to share.

But there will be some situations when we have to break a promise or to reveal a secret for good.Here good is something which doesn't harm anyone but do help someone.
In such situations,
1. should we stick on to principles or
2. should we use our logic to decide whether to do good by revealing a secret or to hinder good by hiding a secret?
I will go for the latter one because I prefer doing good.

It's not just apartment-bound startups that fall victim to this, either. Kosmix, which is a well funded science project that's fooled itself into thinking it can be a major player in search, wrote its own data store in C++. It's basically a clone of Google's GFS because hey, if Google's doing it, then we should too, right? Who knows how much time, energy, and money was wasted on this thing, but that's all time, money, and energy that could go into making their final product not such a joke.