geekdeutsch I got my first issue of my c't subscription. It only takes about 2 days for it to make its way from Germany to the SF Bay Area. The variety of topics covered is really quite insane, everything from a i-book review to an explanation of the CSS system to a tutorial on SmartCard programming. Reading technical content in German is quite entertaining.

CAN in a can Someone posted something about AOS and writing a CAN protocol stack for it... the entry is gone from the recent log and I can't find it. I was wondering if this is the same CAN as in 'Controller Area Network' as in the thing that the Intel AN82527 controller does. I used it in a tank once. It was a long time ago the '27 was only available as samples. I was was wondering if CAN became a widely-used standard, it seems plausable that it someone might use it when building the guts of a satelite.

mathwank graydon dissed Galois (or at least, the entertainment value of the theory). One can't argue with a person's tastes, of course but it reminded me of Galois - his story is interesting especially in the context of all our 'this is what I accomplished today' entries.

Galois developed the theory of Galois groups which can tell you, among other things, whether and when a polynomial equation is solvable. Particularly, you can show that fifth degree polynomials have no general solution. This is a very beautiful and stunning result - everyone learns the formula for the solution of quadratic equation in school, it's not hard to imagine that there could be such a formula for polynomials of any degree. After all, the fundamental theorem of algebra tells us that the roots exist - and yet it turns out you can't always get at them by 'algebraic' (finite sequence of arithmetic/power operations) methods.

How long did this take? Less than it's taken to get, say, Hurd out. Galois was born in 1811, began the study of mathematics at age 15 and died in a duel in 1832. Do the maths. Advogato diary entry, May 30th 1832 - "Wrapped up achieving immortality. Duel tomorrow. Hope it goes well".