Today's Misc.
by JS
I missed one question on this quiz, which puts me in the 91 percentile. I knew Oprah campaigned for Obama, but I misread the question, mistaking talk-show personality for, well, radio talk show personality. Perfection, as usual, is elusive.
I saw the new Batman movie. It is dark and terrifying. I loved it. Check out this review.
Driving home from the theater I randomly started to reconstruct the impossibility proof for distributed consensus in the presence of faults. The basic idea: image such a protocol is possible. Then there must be a shortest protocol (that requires the fewest number of messages). The protocol must still work if the last message is faulty, hence there is a shorter protocol. Contradiction.
Anyway, while this proof is normally referenced in distributed computing, nothing about it prevents us from applying the same theorem to, well, us. I’m sure company management will be thrilled to know that, long as the meeting goes, consensus is impossible. Of course, in everyday experience the term “consensus” doesn’t have the absolute properties of the formal setting.
