Above all else

Derek Price was a scientist, active between the 1940s and 1970s, known for his work in "scientometrics", which is, broadly speaking, the science of measuring and analysing scientific literature.  He proposed a theory for the exponential growth of science - which today is mirrored in a few other theories, perhaps the best known of which is Moore's Law on the exponential growth of computing power. Fun fact, this passion was formed when Price was on a 3-year stint in Singapore at the Raffles College (today, the National University of Singapore) between 1948-1951. He was reading in the Raffles College library and noticed that, when placed in chronological order, the volumes of a scientific journal got thicker and thicker! Derek Price also formulated Price's Law, which is the proposition that a small group of people in a given group are responsible for most of the group's results e.g. that half of scientific literature is produced by the square root of the number of au...

Happy New Year! It looks like 2023 is gonna be yet another year of change. Children are growing up, one already left for university overseas the previous year, the other is starting the Ah Boys to Men process this week! So the home is going to be a bit quieter, and the wife and I will be figuring out how to spend our time wisely. Time. It's a directional dimension. You can move back and forth in space, and given the vastness of the universe, and hey even the earth, it is infinite for all humanly practical purposes. But you can only move ahead in time. And there's a very limited amount of it. I was just looking through some of my previous New Year's entries, and my resolutions. Just a few clicks back, and I have an entry saying "I'm glad I made it to 43 years old". Whoa, how many years have zipped past since then! I'm glad that some resolutions have become part of my life. Exercising regularly, eating healthily, writing this monthly blog, spending my daily ...