The University of Colombo is pleased to announce the University of Colombo International Conference 2026 (UCIC 2026). Chief Guest: Hon. Dr Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. More Information: cmb.ac.lk/ucic-2026 #UCIC2026

University of Colombo and NIA Strengthen Collaboration to Advance Innovation and Entrepreneurship. cmb.ac.lk/nia-strengthen-col… #NIA #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #StartupIncubator #TechnologyTransfer

CALL FOR INNOVATIONS – Student Innovation Expo & Challenge 2026 💡 🗓️ Submission Deadline: 16 August 2026 🔗 More Details & Submission: cmb.ac.lk/ucic-2026/ucic-202… #UCIC2026 #InnovationChallenge #StudentInnovation #CreativeMinds #ResearchAndInnovation

A mathematician at Bell Labs noticed that the scientists who won Nobel Prizes and the ones who never amounted to anything were equally smart, equally hardworking, and equally credentialed, and the only thing that separated them was a single question almost nobody is brave enough to ask themselves before they die. His name was Richard Hamming. He spent 30 years at Bell Labs, in the same building as John Tukey, Walter Brattain, and a long list of physicists who took home Nobel prizes for work they did down the hall from his office, including the legendary Claude Shannon. His invention of error-correcting codes made modern computing possible. He has won the Turing Award. And all the while he was creating his own legacy he was secretly doing a study on the people around him. The study was straightforward. 2 Teams. The legends and the lost. Same I.Q.s. Degrees same. Same desk hours. Same access to the world’s best resources. And yet, at the end of 40 years in their careers, one group had changed entire fields, and the other group could not be remembered by their own colleagues five years after retirement. He wanted to discover what the actual difference was. In March 1986, he stood before 200 researchers in a Bellcore auditorium and told them what he had seen. He said it all came down to one question. And hardly anyone he ever met was willing to ask it directly. He called it the Friday-afternoon ritual. He spent years blocking out his Friday afternoons and not doing anything productive with them every week. No experiments. No meetings. No deliverables. He called it Great Thoughts Time. He sat down with a notebook and asked himself a couple of questions in order. What are the most relevant problems in my discipline? And why I am not working on either of them.” Most weeks, the answer was the same, he said. For a week now he had marched confidently in a direction he did not think was the most important direction. He was a goer. He worked a bit. He was getting clean results that would publish in respected journals. ( And for five days straight he'd been lying to himself about whether any of it mattered. The reason almost nobody does this ritual is because the honest answer is unbearable. The thing is that if you sit down on a Friday afternoon and say out loud that you are not working on the most important problem in your field, now you have to do something about it. You have an immediate change in direction, or you have to keep lying to yourself every week from that point on. Most people choose the lie. In the short term it’s cheaper, but over a career it’s more expensive. Hamming took the ritual a step further in the Bell Labs cafeteria. He began approaching scientists he barely knew, asking them what they thought the most important problems in their field were. A week later he would ask them why they had not worked on these problems. Eventually people wouldn't have lunch with him. “I had to keep finding new tables,” he said. Nobody had a good answer for that, and being around someone who kept asking it made every meal feel like a performance review. The line that broke me is the line that most people skim over in the transcript. His words: If you do not work on an important problem you are unlikely to do important work. That’s not motivational line. It is a rational one. You cannot make a great result from a problem that does not matter. Input restricts the output. The choice of the problem is the ceiling of the career. The transcript has been freely available on the internet for almost 40 years. Stripe Press published the complete lectures as a book. Naval Ravikant quotes it all the time. It’s still given out to new hires at every serious engineering lab in Silicon Valley. Most people will not run the ritual this Friday. They will be busy. They always are.

Pete Hegseth said this was "the first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since WWII" (which is false, but that's beside the point), so I decided to look at what happened in WW2 and... this might surprise no-one: turns out the Nazis were more humane than the Americans. Probably the most abject part here is that the warship had many survivors - 32 to be precise (apnews.com/article/sri-lanka…) - and the U.S. made zero effort to rescue them, despite it being required by the laws of naval warfare and simply being the honorable thing to do. It took little Sri-Lanka, with its very modest means - especially compared to the $1 trillion US defense budget - to do the honorable thing and launch a (successful) rescue operation. Even the literal Nazis, during WW2, rescued the survivors of ships their U-boats sank. It was considered a matter of basic honor. The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconi…). The Laconia was a British troopship sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Right after the sinking, the Nazis immediately began rescuing over 400 survivors, broadcasting - as was common practice - in plain English their position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, so they wouldn't get attacked during the rescue. That's when a US B-24 "Liberator" bomber attacked the submarine anyway, even though all the rescued survivors were on its foredeck. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia's survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast into the sea the remaining survivors that she had rescued and crash dive to avoid being destroyed. The American B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for bravery... This event completely changed Nazi policy on this matter: Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, issued the "Laconiarefehl" - the Laconia Order - forbidding U-boats from rescuing survivors, because the risk to the submarine was now too high. In other words, the Americans during WW2 essentially forced the Nazis to abandon survivors - from the allied side (!) - at sea. Dönitz at least had an excuse.

Sri Lanka has decided to formally take charge of the Iranian vessel IRIS Bushehr (422) and its 208 crew, following days of discussions with relevant authorities, diplomatic missions and the ship’s captain. SLNS Sagara (P622) and SLNS Gajabahu (P626) and several tugs are currently offloading 208 Iranian sailors from the ship who will then be disembarked at Colombo Port. Sri Lankan naval personnel and necessary members of the ship’s crew, will jointly sail the vessel to the Trincomalee Port area. The composition of IRIS Bushehr (422) is the following 53 officers 84 cadet officers 48 senior sailors 21 sailors

Prof. Donald Knuth opened his new paper with "Shock! Shock!" Claude Opus 4.6 had just solved an open problem he'd been working on for weeks — a graph decomposition conjecture from The Art of Computer Programming. He named the paper "Claude's Cycles." 31 explorations. ~1 hour. Knuth read the output, wrote the formal proof, and closed with: "It seems I'll have to revise my opinions about generative AI one of these days." The man who wrote the bible of computer science just said that. In a paper named after an AI. Paper: cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper…

The world, Europe, and Spain have faced this critical moment before. In 2003, a few irresponsible leaders dragged us into an illegal war in the Middle East that brought nothing but insecurity and pain. Our response then must be our response now: NO to violations of international law. NO to the illusion that we can solve the world’s problems with bombs. NO to repeating the mistakes of the past. NO TO WAR. lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/…

"A good teacher does not teach facts; he teaches enthusiasm, open-mindedness and values." — Gian-Carlo Rota

In academia, it is crucial to learn not to devalue others work while manuscript writing, reviewing, and attending presentations. The objective should be to bridge knowledge gaps but not to show-off!

A current publication model...

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” ― Oscar Wilde

As a university professor, I rarely hear from students after the final exam. However, there are always a handful of students who will send personal notes or emails after the semester is over. These mean more to me than you could possibly imagine. Students, if you enjoy the class, let the teacher know. They truly love hearing it.

In academia, it’s easy to feel pressured by numbers. But true impact comes from meaningful research & lasting support to young researchers. Focus on quality, build strong mentorship, & progress at a pace that aligns with your values. Success is in the journey, not the metrics.

The Memory Management Unit (MMU) is not a chip—it's a function. Despite common belief, the MMU is not a single physical chip or even a single well-defined block of logic on a modern CPU die. Instead, “MMU” refers to a distributed set of translation and protection mechanisms implemented across the processor core. These include the Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs), the page-table walker, access-permission checkers, and portions of the load/store pipelines that enforce the architectural memory rules. In other words, the MMU is the collection of hardware mechanisms that allow the processor to perform virtual-to-physical address translation and enforce the memory-protection policies defined by the operating system. The fact that these mechanisms are physically scattered across the die, rather than located in a single module, is an implementation detail hidden behind the abstraction of “the MMU.”

The original internet was built on protocols, not platforms. We need to return to that era.

The Civil Engineering Sectional Committee (CESC) of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka, has aimed to develop a database of Engineers, who volunteer to offer technical expertise to support this disastrous situations. In light of the prevailing extremely difficult situations in the country, we, the CESC invite our members to assist here with your relevant experience and willingness using the form below. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F… Your contribution will help strengthen our collective capacities to prosper effectively and to serve the nation when it needs the most. Copied

Word of the day is 'spuddle' (19th century): to be extremely busy whilst achieving absolutely nothing.

PhD interview season is back, so here’s my advice: For prospective PhD students, choosing a supportive mentor is 100 times more important than choosing a supervisor simply because they are at a top or famous institution.

If your code to process a 10GB file looks like read(fd, buf, ...) in a loop, you're wasting memory and killing performance. There's a better way. mmap() lets you treat a 100GB file as if it's just a giant array in memory, even with only a few MB of RAM. Here's why it's a cornerstone of high-performance I/O. 🧵👇