Indian Star Wars, and reaching YouTube's limits | #52
Also, overnight programming at Wimbledon
Friends,
In these difficult times, please do consider donating to any of these causes that are helping curb the pandemic.
In interesting news from this past week, the price of a class A share of Berkshire Hathaway crossed $421,000. This is being seen as the “Y2K problem” for the share market. Nasdaq and other market operators record stock prices in a compact computer format that uses 32 bits. The largest number possible is 2 to the 32nd power minus one, or 4,294,967,295. Stock prices are frequently stored using four decimal places, so the highest possible price is $429,496.7295.
This week we take a look at similar problems caused by computational limits.
Things we Learnt this week
YouTube’s view count was stored in a 32 bit integer. But ̶S̶a̶i̶ ̶G̶a̶n̶e̶s̶h̶ Psy changed it all. His Gangnam Style became so popular that they had to upgrade its view counter. This upgrade changed the maximum view count to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. This means our YouTube channel needs only a few quintillion more views to get there. Baby shark steps as they say.
Nicolas Mahut and John Isner started their first round Wimbledon tennis match on 22nd June 2010 at 6.13PM. After 4 grueling sets, the game was paused to be resumed the next day. No one expected Isner and Mahut to play the entirety of the next day though. The second day’s scores ended tied at 59-59 but the electronic scoreboard still showed 47-47 due to a bug. IBM developers worked through the night to fix it. The game finally ended on the 3rd day with Isner winning 70-68 in the fifth. Talk about nerve and volley.
We all strive for perfection in life - but only a handful achieve it. Nothing exemplifies this than the scorers of the gymnastics event at the 1976 Olympics. A 14 year old Nadia Comaneci, reeled off 7 perfect performances to blow away the opposition as well as the scorecard. Her perfect 10’s were recorded as 1.00. Gymnastics has changed its scoring methodology to avoid this now.
From IWTK with love
Rajiv Menon adapted Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and modernized it to make the remarkable ‘Kandukondain Kandukondain’. Our thread celebrating this legendary movie
In 2002, Prasar Bharati spent a lot of money to produce Aryaman - a Star Wars rip off. Watch clips from the show below. May the farce be with you.
Only in India
The second wave is upon us and it is extremely important for governments to work at speed to procure medical equipment…. for cows? That is actually happening in UP. More like moo-dical equipment. Ha!
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