Brown Motion

Whoa! It is time in our household to help our only offspring to undock from what has been home for the past seventeen years and help seek out a new home aka a higher learning institution.  This undocking is not just physical, it is emotional, it is about leaving familiar and diving into multiple unknowns. A time of escalating stress it turns out.  Not having any personal background in the business of education as it is run in America we the parents are coming in as underdogs.  Admittedly there is a world of information available beyond a few strokes of a keyboard that was not the case a quarter century ago, when we went and got our engineering degrees. Exactly.  That too can be a curse.  TMI.  Inputs and chatter across virtual boards and physical.  On the track and field, or in speech meets, parents with multiple offsprings and one in college are shelling out their tricks and tips voluntarily.  Now mind you this is not true of all school di...

As a kid learning math I am trying to remember when I first encountered the concept of a million.  Seems like many moons ago.  I must have been in middle school when a friend of the family knowing my proclivity for math handed me a book written by some Russian professors (translated to English). It was a book of curious math problems and explained concepts like large numbers in some detail.  I think that may have been my introduction to appreciating a number like a million.  One followed by six zeroes. As in the distance between earth and our moon is a quarter of that.  In miles.  A million heart beats is a lifetime of 9 days since a human heart beats at around 115,000 of them each day. But this number pales when you start discussing capitalism. Recently in the news... 1. Elon Musk, the famous entrepreneur was fined $20M for blabbing about taking Tesla private when in fact it was not so. 2.  Facebook was hacked.  50M accounts were compr...