The beauty of life is, while we cannot undo what is done,
we can see it, understand it, learn from it and change.
So that every new moment is spent not in regret, guilt, fear or anger,
but in wisdom, understanding and love. - Jennifer Edwards
my pen hits the paper
my thoughts run wild
inconceivable,
oblivion, they go
the words within me
find forms at his feet
insanity, i meet
at the touch of his fingertips
he mapped out my destiny
before time began
in constant constellation
i plunder my sins
what he doesn’t know
he should never know
irrevocable
“his”
i’ve been branded so
deep in soul reckoning
lies the taste of his lips
remembering my passion
at the time of his kiss
At precisely 23:31:30 GMT tonight, Unix time hits a unique milestone. But computer scientists dread the digital apocalypse that is yet to come
That’s because at precisely 23:31:30 GMT tonight (Friday), the ten-digit clock used by Unix computers – which includes the servers that run everything from the internet to air traffic control – will display all ten decimal digits in sequence.
For computer geeks everywhere, this seemingly dubious milestone deserve celebrations just like those that greeted the end of the millennium. Parties are planned around the world from London to New York, to Yerevan in Armenia and Asunción in Paraguay.
But after the brief flash of joy, comes the dread. Computer scientists fear the worst for the next major moment in Unix time – some time in the year 2038, when the Unix clock will run out of seconds it can count. On that January day, computers will fail to compute time, and crash. Your computer could shut down. Vehicles may pile up as traffic lights fail. Planes could fall out of the sky. The advice is to party now, because the digital apocalypse may soon be upon us.
Understanding how this will happen requires you to do away with your parochial understanding of time, and instead think more like a machine. You, being human, were under the impression that today was merely Friday February 13 in the year of our Lord, 2009.
Computers count time differently. They simply count the seconds from “Co-ordinated Standard Time”, or to human beings, the seconds elapsed from midnight, January 1, 1970 – the digital equivalent of the birth of Christ. Unix time is how many seconds there have been since then (not including leap seconds, in case you were wondering).
But why is 1234567890 a more significant moment in time than any other sequence of numbers?
“All calendars are just arbitrary,” argues Julian Burgess, a web developer from London. “Celebrating the millennium – why do that? It was just like any other day, the Earth rotates on its axis and it moves around the Sun. All these things are arbitrary, so for geeks to celebrate Unix time is something for them to enjoy.”
Others said it was the beauty of the number sequence that was worthy of celebration. “If you can’t get excited about all those numbers lined up in a row, well then this will clearly be lost on you,” said Ben Doddington, a computer scientist from Bookham in Surrey.
Unix is an operating system, like Windows which runs PCs, that was developed in the late 1960s by Bell Labs. Millions of modern PCs, including Apple’s Macintosh computers, and entire computer systems still run on Unix or derivatives of it, such as Linux.
When Unix was first developed, computer storage of information was expensive, and with time being infinite, this created a problem. The brains behind Unix needed to cut down how much time a computer could store. So the developers created a time-counting system where time is represented as a 32-bit integer. This means that every second can be represented by a comination of 32 zeros or ones.
The problem with a 32-bit integer like this is that it can only count 4,294,967,296 seconds, or 136 years. This covers a period between 1901 and 2038. Once the Unix time clocks reach that moment they will “overflow” and the fear is many computers will stop working as a result, or at least suffer major problems. It’s the same principle as the millennium bug, but one that many scientists believe should be be taken more seriously, as only people who count in binary will see it coming.
Fear not, the same computer scientists who were alone in celebrating the 1234567890 moment are the ones we will now rely on to update modern computer systems to a new counting system that will use a 64-bit integer. This will allow computers to count back 20 times the age of the universe, and around 293 billion years into the future. At which point, if man and machine are still around, they will have to deal with same problem all over again.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5727189.ece
which has already passed for 3:31:30 PM (PST) 
Cũng đã lâu lắm rồi không về Việt Nam … cũng đã gần 16 năm rồi … hơn nửa đời người sống bên đất Mỹ . Nhìn hình xưa và nay của đất Việt, thấy xa vời nhưng thân thương lạ .
Trước kia chợ Bến Thành có tên là Marche’ Central (Chợ Trung Tâm) Còn công viên Quách Thị Trang bây giờ là Quãng trường Place du Marche’ Central …
Les Halles et Les Bureaux du chemin de fer : văn fòng trụ sở Hoả xa (văn fòng xe lửa)
Và đây là Sài Gòn hôm nay ….
Boulevard Charner (Đại lô Charner ) nay là Đại Lộ Nguyễn Huệ …
Bây giờ …
.
Một điểm quan trọng của Sài Gòn Xưa là Nhà Hát Lớn Thành Phố mà hồi đó gọi là The’a^tre Munieipal de SAIGON ..
Con đường cắt ngang Nhà Hát Lớn là đường Đồng Khởi (một trong những con đường đẹp nhất ViệtNam)
Ngày xưa có tên là La Rue Catinat …
Phía bên tay phải là Khách Sạn Continental (1 trong 2 khách sạn lâu đời nhất Sàigòn)
Và đây là cuối đường Đồng Khởi (Catinat) chạy về phía bến Bạch Đằng …bên trái là Khách sạn Majestic , Khách Sạn đầu tiên mà nhà nước Đại Pháp xây tại SG …
Để Thiết lập nền cai trị của mình trên đất AnNam thì cơ sở vật chất là điều tất yếu vì thế mà Toà Thị Chính của SàiGòn được xây dựng tiếng Pháp gọi là L’Ho^tel de ville (Lô-ten-đờ-vin) dịch sát nghĩa là Khách Sạn thành phố ?…nay là Uỷ Ban Nhân dân …
Bên Tay phải các bạn là Khách Sạn REX
bây giờ Dinh Độc Lập thời Pháp thuộc – Palais du Gouvneur
Toà Án Nhân Dân Xưa – Palais de Justice (trên đường Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa nay ) 
Nhà Thờ Đức Bà – Nortre Dam de SaiGon / Catherdrale et Ho^tel de la postes (bưu điện thành phố )
Pagode de Dakau (nay là Chùa Ngọc Hoàng hay Phước Hải Tự trên đường Mai Thị Lựu)
(Sưu tầm)
posted: 12 February 2009 12:05 pm ET
If you fear Friday the 13th, then batten down the hatches. This week’s unlucky day is the first of three this year.
The next Friday the 13th comes in March, followed by Nov. 13. Such a triple whammy comes around only every 11 years, said Thomas Fernsler, a math specialist at the University of Delaware who has studied the number 13 for more than 20 years.
By the numbers
Here are 13 more facts about the infamous day, courtesy of Fernsler and some of our own research:
1. The British Navy built a ship named Friday the 13th. On its maiden voyage, the vessel left dock on a Friday the 13th, and was never heard from again.
2. The ill-fated Apollo 13 launched at 13:13 CST on Apr. 11, 1970. The sum of the date’s digits (4-11-70) is 13 (as in 4+1+1+7+0 = 13). And the explosion that crippled the spacecraft occurred on April 13 (not a Friday). The crew did make it back to Earth safely, however.
3. Many hospitals have no room 13, while some tall buildings skip the 13th floor.
4. Fear of Friday the 13th — one of the most popular myths in science — is called paraskavedekatriaphobia as well as friggatriskaidekaphobia. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13.
5. Quarterback Dan Marino wore No. 13 throughout his career with the Miami Dolphins. Despite being a superb quarterback (some call him one of the best ever), he got to the Super Bowl just once, in 1985, and was trounced 38-16 by the San Francisco 49ers and Joe Montana (who wore No. 16 and won all four Super Bowls he played in).
6. Butch Cassidy, notorious American train and bank robber, was born on Friday, April 13, 1866.
7. Fidel Castro was born on Friday, Aug. 13, 1926.
8. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would not travel on the 13th day of any month and would never host 13 guests at a meal. Napoleon and Herbert Hoover were also triskaidekaphobic, with an abnormal fear of the number 13.
9. Superstitious diners in Paris can hire a quatorzieme, or professional 14th guest.
10. Mark Twain once was the 13th guest at a dinner party. A friend warned him not to go. “It was bad luck,” Twain later told the friend. “They only had food for 12.”
11. Woodrow Wilson considered 13 his lucky number, though his experience didn’t support such faith. He arrived in Normandy, France on Friday, Dec. 13, 1918, for peace talks, only to return with a treaty he couldn’t get Congress to sign. (The ship’s crew wanted to dock the next day due to superstitions, Fernsler said.) He toured the United States to rally support for the treaty, and while traveling, suffered a near-fatal stroke.
12. The number 13 suffers from its position after 12, according to numerologists who consider the latter to be a complete number — 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 days of Christmas and 12 eggs in a dozen.
13. The seals on the back of a dollar bill include 13 steps on the pyramid, 13 stars above the eagle’s head, 13 war arrows in the eagle’s claw and 13 leaves on the olive branch. So far there’s been no evidence tying these long-ago design decisions to the present economic situation.
Origins of Friday the 13th
Where’s all this superstition come from? Nobody knows for sure. But it may date back to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune.
Meanwhile the belief that numbers are connected to life and physical things — called numerology — has a long history.
“You can trace it all the way from the followers of Pythagoras, whose maxim to describe the universe was ‘all is number,’” says Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author of “The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved” (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Thinkers who studied under the famous Greek mathematician combined numbers in different ways to explain everything around them, Livio said.
In modern times, numerology has become a type of para-science, much like the meaningless predictions of astrology, scientists say.
“People are subconsciously drawn towards specific numbers because they know that they need the experiences, attributes or lessons, associated with them, that are contained within their potential,” says professional numerologist Sonia Ducie. “Numerology can ‘make sense’ of an individual’s life (health, career, relationships, situations and issues) by recognizing which number cycle they are in, and by giving them clarity.”
Mathematicians dismiss numerology as having no scientific merit, however.
“I don’t endorse this at all,” Livio said, when asked to comment on the popularity of commercial numerology for a story prior to the date 06/06/06. Seemingly coincidental connections between numbers will always appear if you look hard enough, he said.
http://www.livescience.com/culture/090212-friday-13th.html
It is he who wrote “Love is space and time measured by the heart.” It is he who also wrote “Love is a reciprocal torture.” M. Proust.
I am not here to beg the differ, to dissent his point of view. He is correct. Proust is right, to the absolute, in accordance to my experience, that is. I have failed to love, to be loved in both short and long distance relation with people. Maybe, not entirely, but to the extent, with the most important ones–the ones that hurt, anyway.
But I have not given up on Hope. Hope is the only thing that no one from the outside can take away from me. No one can touches it or feels it–but me. It’s mine. Entirely.
Hope is a good thing and I’m sure, no good thing ever dies.
