The Feynman point is the first instance of six consecutive 9s in π

Feinman said he wanted to be able to recite the 700-odd digits of π up to that sequence, and then say “nine nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on”. Brilliant.

Early programmer Maurice Wilkes is attributed as saying:

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

It’s still true today, despite the amazing tools that now exist to support programmers.

One of the great problems is that the human brain is so good at decoding information, it’s very hard to decide what is helpful to a user. Many of the tasks that are feasible with a computer are so trivial to a human that when they go wrong even a small number of times, they create real anger. A small insight into the power of the brain can be perceived with the following experiment on Sine Wave Speech. I was blown away by the gap in understanding before and after the process.

The technology refers to Inertial Electrostatic Confinement, a technique which Robert Bussard* used in experiments with the original wiffle ball. Bussard died in 2007, but you can see that his work continues, in part in The Emc2 Fusion Development Corporation. I presume that they will be bidders in the naval tender.