For the heck of it

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Google manages your life!

Well not literally, but certainly allows you to manage your "To Do" list quite precisely. The company has launched its web-based calendar service that ties into its excellent mail serivice GMail, and allows you to add meetings and events using your own words.



Dubbed Google Calendar, a beta version of the service went live last week. Using Google Calendar, you will be able to create new events directly out of your GMail messages. You can also use a feature called QuickAdd in order to add appointments using natural language, typing "Candlelight dinner with girl friend" to create a new calendar entry, for instance.

Once events are created, Google Calendar will send out e-mail invitations to other participants and send event reminders and change notifications to the Google user. According to the search engine giant, setting up a personal calendar is only part of the picture.

Google Calendar will also allow you to search for and then subscribe to publicly available calendars -- the schedule of a cricket match for instance -- and then integrate that information into your calendar.

Google Calendar, which will support the iCal data exchange standard used by a number of groupware products, will also allow you to share your calendars with others using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) syndication technology.

Find Google Calendar here.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Hell and Thermodynamics

One of the mails, which I received as a forward. Though the story's nice, I am not sure whether it's true.

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic(absorbs heat)?


Image courtesy: Dustylens.com

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion , we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell, because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the theory given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct ...leaving only.

Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

This student received the only "A" given.