Haven't bothered to mention it before, but actually for almost a month now since I got home to Hawaii from the mainland, I've been dealing with the Achilles' heel of my health, which is severe post-viral asthma.  A teeny little two-day cold arrives and disappears quite nicely, but my lungs take one look at this puny invader and shriek.  My immune system brings out  quite ineffective elephant guns to deal with this apparent nothing of a cold, and the next thing you know there's bacteria filling  both lungfields, and I am having a dreadful time just breathing. Crazy.

Anyway, I am getting better day by day. Needless to say, all this nonsense has put my current  IM project pretty much on hold for awhile.  But as I have little bursts of energy off and on during the day, I open the computer and learn something. (Actually, I first open the computer and check on what my WA friends are up to ----I enjoy connecting with you all, and I always learn something .)

One thing I've been doing is clearing up some of the vague sense I have of certain specific   IM terms.  Which leads me to the whole Larry Page thing.

Page rank.  Never knew precisely what it was. I knew it went 0-10 or 1-10 depending on whether you thought the absence of a result should be included or not, and I figured vaguely it must have something to do with what page Google thought your site should be on...tho if you set up your search to show 10 results per page or 20...or 100...wouldn't that change what page Google was talking about in your page rank???

Soooooo, I googled it.  Page rank.  Well yeah, it's an algorhythm Google uses to decide the importance (or whatever) of your page.

That's when it jumped out at me . Page!  Larry Page!  As in Sergei Brin and Larry Page who co-founded Google and have played within it for years now!

Long story short, Page (and then Page/Brin and others) dreamed up this algorhythm while at Stanford.(parenthetically, the patent for this is assigned to Stanford and Google has an exclusive licence for  its use from Stanford.  reportedly, Stanford got a gazillion shares from Google in the licensing agreement, and sold them in 2005 for over $300 million.  Not bad.)

On and on.  Alegbra and logarithms and proprietary secrets, speculation and intrigue---all the elements of a good spy story (especially that algebra element...) Until one day Google tells us, hey ----don't focus on page rank.  We never wanted you to do this.  Stop, we say. Stop!

Only, we didn't stop of course.  Page rank is so enmeshed in our thinking. And it used to be quite enmeshed deep within my muddled thinking.

But I have totally let go of Page Rank.  Now that I am so clear (!) on what it is all about, to me it is the Larry Page Rank. And I finally get it.

One question remains:  did everybody else know all along that what we thought was about plain ol' boring pages kind of  Page Rank was really the Larry Page Rank  ??Was I the only one who didn't know ?????????