Gates minus Microsoft


Microsoft is getting ready for business as asual, without Bill Gates, who
will now spend more time with his charity organization.

Speaking of his charity act, a short story by Frederick Forsyth called
‘The Emperor’ comes to my mind. The ‘Emperor is about an aged tourist
who toils hard to catch a rare fish and then to everyone’s surprise
sets the fish free back into the sea. The whole village celebrates his feat
and the tourist in one stroke becomes an expert fisherman and decides to
make a career out of it.

May be for people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, it is the journey
that matters more than the ‘catch’. A journey completed, they move
on to another. The world is hopeful that this new journey of Bill Gates
would make a significant difference to the real world and also be less
controversial:)

Here is an excellent set of articles on Bill Gates at Fortune.com
and Forbes.com

I see doomed people:Shyamalan

In M. Night Shyamalan’s film Signs, the protagonist suffers a crisis of faith
so deep that it takes an alien invasion of Earth for him to work it out.
In Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Happening, which opens today, the
protagonist suffers a crisis of reason. Unfortunately, this time not even the
looming extinction of humanity resolves it for him.

Given that it’s mass entertainment, the film raises a lot of interesting
questions about science, and it’s clear from it that Shyamalan’s interest
in science goes much deeper than a superficial mining of ideas for plotlines.
His protagonist, high school biology teacher Elliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg),
lectures about the limits of science’s ability to explain the world and applies
his critical faculties to staying alive when the “happening” happens.

More at Scientific American