Sanjay Ghemawat

"At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He's a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family's backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward A discussion between Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan about the origin and evolution of the Google File System." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

Surprisingly candid and detailed :). - Private Sanjeev

"Morgan's research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially "stress hardy" or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"The ones with metronomic heartbeats, Morgan says, shoot more bad guys and kill fewer hostages. Unfortunately, this metronomic effect is usually associated with early heart disease and even sudden death. Morgan wonders whether the same thing that makes you really good at surviving under high stress may not translate into excellent heart health when you're 50." - ⓞnor

Interesting! Heart-rate variability is one of the properties supposedly measured (on a good day, sigh) by the biofeedback interface that comes with the "Wild Divine" series of meditation training games. I never quite figured out whether it was supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. - Jutta Degener

"At the moment, the Great Zucchini was trying and failing to blow up a balloon, letting it whap him in the face, hard. Then he poured water on his head. Then he produced what appeared to be a soiled diaper, wiped his cheek with it, and wore it like a hat as the kids ewwww-ed. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Great Zucchini was behaving like a complete idiot." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"plugs directly into one's Mac and converts files up to 1080p (from camcorders, digital cameras, etc.) into files that are perfectly formatted for iPods, PSPs or other media players. The bundled software also lets users preview and trim video clips before converting, and it saves folks the time and hassle of importing into iMovie, learning commands, rendering and exporting. Reportedly, a video that would take an hour to convert to an iPod-friendly file takes just 15 minutes with this here dongle, and if that's worth $149.95 to you, you're one click away from brightening your own day." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Osvath said the chimpanzee had also been observed tapping on concrete boulders in the park to identify weak parts and then knocking out a piece. If it was too big for throwing, he broke it into smaller pieces, before adding them to his arsenal." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"If we really wanted to fill our lives with joy and save energy and money, if we really wanted to move beyond the fiction of our agrarian conception of time and into the modern world, we'd shift to year-round Daylight Saving Time--or, if we really wanted to embrace reality and maximize life, go to Double DST, a big, two-hour push forward of the clocks that would turn our summers into a marathon of gorgeous, endless evenings." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

History repeats PBS NOVA ran a special years ago about Black-Scholes and Long Term Capital Management. The problem with all these risk models is that they encourage big bets and recursive betting, so they degenerate into a Martingale gamble, and we all know how that turns out. - Ray Cromwell

"The beauty of the Jaipur foot is its lightness and mobility--those who wear it can run, climb trees and pedal bicycles--and its low price." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Finally, in March 2008, NIST compared a single-ion mercury transition with a transition in trapped aluminium atoms, obtaining accuracies of just 5 parts in 10^17 - about 1 second in 650 million years (Science, vol 319, p 1808). Caesium's 53-year reign as king of the clocks was over." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"For decades, researchers have been searching for answers as to why there is such a pronounced seasonality of influenza incidence, which peaks during the winter in temperate regions. Potential explanations are that people spend more time indoors and thus transmit the virus more easily; less sunlight may have a chemical effect on the virus and/or people's immune response; or there might be an unknown environmental control." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Sketch a rough shape with your finger and Instaviz transforms what you drew in a split second. Sketch a link between two shapes and Instaviz quickly redraws the graph with the best layout" - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

Cool interface for producing dot (graphviz) graphs. Now if only I can find a webdav server to export to... - Sanjay Ghemawat

@Sanjay You probably already have access to one: http://manas.tungare.name/blog... - Manas Tungare

"Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Perfect for the music lover who has everything, the Atech AC-0101-R02 iCarta Stereo Dock lets you enjoy your iPod in the most important room in your home" - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

Ha! Very creative! - Karen Padham Taylor

"Boise, Idaho – residents may not fish from a giraffe's back." - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

"Arizona - Any misdemeanor committed while wearing a red mask is considered a felony." - Ruchira S. Datta

"Japanese robot company Cyberdyne has begun renting out in Japan a belted device called HAL, for "hybrid assistive limb,"" - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

Nice combination of version control, shared repositories, and automated builds/tests. - Sanjay Ghemawat from Bookmarklet

We use a similar model (but no compile daemon yet). Pulling from a central repo is much more natural for people used to perforce. - Sanjeev Singh

I heart git for this :P - mjc

They really need a better ad agency :) - Sanjeev Singh

I'm dumbfounded. What do they want us to think? - Paul Haahr