Simplicity Works Everytime

Links for 2013 May 12

2013-05-12T18:10:00.002+08:00

Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat
Liberals will claim this is a fair 200 million, unlike Romney's which was built off PE???

Obama’s Cybersecurity Lifts Check Point: Israel Overnight
What about Palo Alto Networks?

ESPN Wants to Pay Your Wireless Bill (Restrictions Apply)
Slowly lurching towards net non-neutrality

The Glock Divorce Comes to America, Revealing New Details About the Gunmaker
The tide has gone out

NYPD Plans to Release Non-Toxic Gases in the Subway
Who is making money off this?

Cost to Treat a Lung Infection: $97,214? Why New Data Are Useless
Healthcare is the next finance. When the revolution starts there will be a whole less useless clerks pulling 1/2 a million a year...

Tiffany vs. Costco: Which Diamond Ring Is Better?
Cost of diamond is directly proportional to boast value to a woman's girlfriends... Better to get a shitty Tiffany's than a GIA vertified Costco...

Weird Bloomberg headlines - May 12

2013-05-12T17:56:00.001+08:00

Stripper Site OK’d for Dancers’ Notice of Lawsuit Dollars

The most beautiful anti-war poem

2013-05-11T01:19:00.002+08:00

"Ave Imperatrix"

Set in this stormy Northern sea,
Queen of these restless fields of tide,
England! what shall men say of thee,
Before whose feet the worlds divide?
The earth, a brittle globe of glass,
Lies in the hollow of thy hand,
And through its heart of crystal pass,
Like shadows through a twilight land,

The spears of crimson-suited war,
The long white-crested waves of fight,
And all the deadly fires which are
The torches of the lords of Night.

The yellow leopards, strained and lean,
The treacherous Russian knows so well,
With gaping blackened jaws are seen
Leap through the hail of screaming shell.

The strong sea-lion of England's wars
Hath left his sapphire cave of sea,
To battle with the storm that mars
The stars of England's chivalry.

The brazen-throated clarion blows
Across the Pathan's reedy fen,
And the high steeps of Indian snows
Shake to the tread of armed men.

And many an Afghan chief, who lies
Beneath his cool pomegranate-trees,
Clutches his sword in fierce surmise
When on the mountain-side he sees

The fleet-foot Marri scout, who comes
To tell how he hath heard afar
The measured roll of English drums
Beat at the gates of Kandahar.

For southern wind and east wind meet
Where, girt and crowned by sword and fire,
England with bare and bloody feet
Climbs the steep road of wide empire.

O lonely Himalayan height,
Grey pillar of the Indian sky,
Where saw'st thou last in clanging flight
Our winged dogs of Victory?

The almond-groves of Samarcand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow,
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go:

And on from thence to Ispahan,
The gilded garden of the sun,
Whence the long dusty caravan
Brings cedar wood and vermilion;

And that dread city of Cabool
Set at the mountain's scarped feet,
Whose marble tanks are ever full
With water for the noonday heat:

Where through the narrow straight Bazaar
A little maid Circassian
Is led, a present from the Czar
Unto some old and bearded Khan, –

Here have our wild war-eagles flown,
And flapped wide wings in fiery fight;
But the sad dove, that sits alone
In England – she hath no delight.

In vain the laughing girl will lean
To greet her love with love-lit eyes:
Down in some treacherous black ravine,
Clutching his flag, the dead boy lies.

And many a moon and sun will see
The lingering wistful children wait
To climb upon their father's knee;
And in each house made desolate

Pale women who have lost their lord
Will kiss the relics of the slain –
Some tarnished epaulette – some sword –
Poor toys to soothe such anguished pain.

For not in quiet English fields
Are these, our brothers, lain to rest,
Where we might deck their broken shields
With all the flowers the dead love best.

For some are by the Delhi walls,
And many in the Afghan land,
And many where the Ganges falls
Through seven mouths of shifting sand.

And some in Russian waters lie,
And others in the seas which are
The portals to the East, or by
The wind-swept heights of Trafalgar.

O wandering graves! O restless sleep!
O silence of the sunless day!
O still ravine! O stormy deep!
Give up your prey! Give up your prey!

And thou whose wounds are never healed,
Whose weary race is never won,
O Cromwell's England! must thou yield
For every inch of ground a son?

Go! crown with thorns thy gold-crowned head,
Change thy glad song to song of pain;
Wind and wild wave have got thy dead,
And will not yield them back again.

Wave and wild wind and foreign shore
Possess the flower of English land –
Lips that thy lips shall kiss no more,
Hands that shall never clasp thy hand.

What profit now that we have bound
The whole round world with nets of gold,
If hidden in our heart is found
The care that groweth never old?

What profit that our galleys ride,
Pine-forest-like, on every main?
Ruin and wreck are at our side,
Grim warders of the House of Pain.

Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet?
Where is our English chivalry?
Wild grasses are their burial-sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.

O loved ones lying far away,
What word of love can dead lips send!
O wasted dust! O senseless clay!
Is this the end! is this the end!

Peace, peace! we wrong the noble dead
To vex their solemn slumber so;
Though childless, and with thorn-crowned head,
Up the steep road must England go,

Yet when this fiery web is spun,
Her watchmen shall descry from far
The young Republic like a sun
Rise from these crimson seas of war.

~ Oscar Wilde. The complete opposite of Kipling when it came to war and imperialism.

Words to live by

2013-05-11T00:59:00.000+08:00

By James Mattis

[Dear, "Bill"]

The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

With [Task Force] 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in [Afghanistan], and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.

For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say … “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us.

We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the [Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures]? What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher [Headquarters] can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance — in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don’t know what the warning signs are — that your unit’s preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting — Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel’s Papers (remember “Kampstaffel”?), Montgomery’s book (“Eyes Officers”…), “Grant Takes Command” (need for commanders to get along, “commanders’ relationships” being more important than “command relationships”), and some others.

As a result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

Hope this answers your question…. I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.

Semper Fi, Mattis

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes

2013-05-11T00:41:00.003+08:00

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier
So-oldier ~of~ the Queen! "

~ Rudyard Kipling - "The Young British Soldier"

"Inactive" account manager

2013-05-09T23:30:00.000+08:00

I can imagine the conversation around the table as they brainstormed a name for this feature.

Setup my inactive settings today. Truly nerve wracking as you confront your own mortality. Try it out to see what I mean.

High Flight

2013-05-08T04:37:00.004+08:00

Distilling the magic of flight...

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

More background behind the poem here...

Came across this poem when reading more about Reagan's speech after the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986.

"The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave... We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God."

Oldie but goldie

2013-05-05T03:59:00.002+08:00

What do you do guaranteed?

I hate coffee

2013-05-05T03:50:00.000+08:00

I hate the way the taste stays with me for next 3 days. I hate the pungent smell that hits my brain.

And most of all, I hate going to fourbucks for it.

Book Review: As far as my feet will carry me

2009-11-02T23:54:00.002+08:00

It never rains but it pours... Must be my character trait... The dry spell has been broken and the reading habit is back.. with a vengeance.

The latest object of my affection is this one...

Synopsis:

German officer captured towards war'e end. Sentenced to 25 years in East Cape, Siberia (eastern most part of Russia). Really bad conditions. Escapes and walks to Iran.

Comparisons are inevitable with "The Long Walk". Not as captivating as the Long Walk... But still good. If The Long Walk is 5 stars, this is 4.

Book Review: The long walk

2009-11-01T20:28:00.004+08:00

God it has been ages since I read a dead-tree book.

The first mention I saw of this book was on reading about the controversy surrounding the author in the Readers Digest. This is the story of a Polish officer imprisoned by the Soviets in the Siberian gulag in 1941 after the invasion of Poland by Germany and USSR. He escaped from the Gulag with 6 friends and walked all the way to India in 11 months...

The Readers Digest says the essence of the story is true. But the pilgrimage was undertaken by some other polish officer who was later debriefed by the author after his escape...

Anyway a pretty good read...

Thoughts on insider trading charges against McKinsey, Intel, IBM'ers

2009-10-19T23:49:00.001+08:00

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad"

~~ Theodore Roosevelt

Information design done right

2009-10-17T18:10:00.001+08:00

Making sense of the Galleon ring...

From the WSJ

If you have to read 1 article today...

2009-10-10T11:47:00.001+08:00

Read this...

The nature of wealth

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14587262#

Bagger Vance and the Bhagvad Gita

2009-07-05T18:40:00.005+08:00

Watched "Legend of the Bagger Vance" after a long time... This is one movie I can watch again and again... On the same day!!

Winston Churchill said that "golf is a more expensive way of playing marbles". I agree. Yet I love this movie.

Bagger Vance is as much about golf as "Gone with the Wind" is about the Civil War. Golf is merely a backdrop to the story.

The movie is actually a modern day interpretation of the Bhagvad Gita. Will Smith (Bagger Vance) as a caddy plays the role of Krishna advising the confused Batt Damon (Randolf Junnah - R Junnah - Arjuna!!) about discovering himself, pulling himself backup and moving on with his life.

Charlize Theron, Will Smith and Damon have given performances which I dont think will be repeated in their career..

Run, don't walk, to get this movie. Something worth adding to a collection if you have on

Age of entitlement to Age of thrift

2009-06-22T22:30:00.000+08:00

Pimco Credit May 27 2009

Paul Tudor Jones on Failure

2009-06-20T18:39:00.000+08:00

From http://www.scribd.com/doc/16588637/Paul-Tudor-Jones-Failure-Speech-June-2009

PERFECT FAILURE

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO GRADUATING CLASS OF

THE BUCKLEY SCHOOL

June 10, 2009

When I was asked to give the commencement address to a graduating class of 9th graders, I jumped at the chance. You see, I have four teenagers of my own and I feel like this is the point in my life when I am supposed to tell them something profound. So thank you Buckley community for giving me this opportunity. I tried this speech out on them last night and am happy to report that none of them fell asleep until I was three quarters done.

When composing this message I searched my memory for my same experience back in 1969 when I was sitting right where you are. I realized that I could hardly remember one single speaker from my junior high or high school days. Now that could be my age. I’m old enough now that some days I can’t remember how old I am. But it could also have been a sign of the times. Remember, I was part of the student rebellion, and we did not listen to anything that someone over 30 said because they were just too clueless. Or so we thought.

Anyway, as I sat there considering this speech further, I suddenly had a flashback of the one speaker who I actually did remember from youthful days. He was a Shakespearean actor who came to our school to extol the virtues of Shakespeare. He started out by telling us that Shakespeare was not about poetry or romance or love, but instead, was all about battle, and fighting and death and war. Then he pulled out a huge sword which he began waving over the top of his head as he described various bloody conflicts that were all part and parcel of Shakespeare’s plays. Now being a 15-year old testosterone laden student at an all boys school, I thought this was pretty cool. I remember thinking, “Yea, this guy gets it. Forget about the deep meaning and messages in the words, let’s talk about who’s getting the blade.”

As you can see, I have a similar sword which I am going to stop waving over my head now, because A) I think you are permanently scarred, and B) the headmaster looks like he is about to tackle me and C) some of you, I can tell, are way too excited about this sword, and you’re scaring me a little.

I’m here with you young men today because your parents wanted me to speak to you about service—that is, serving others and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time in your life. Don’t get me wrong, serving others is really, really important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God. Money won’t do it. Fame won’t do it. Nor will sex, drugs, homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.

Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any of you 9th graders know. It’s a word that is so terrible that your parents won’t talk about it; your teachers won’t talk about it; and you certainly don’t ever want to dwell on it. But this is a preparatory school, and you need to be prepared to deal with this phenomenon because you will experience it. That is a guarantee. Every single one of you will experience it not once but multiple times, and every adult in this room has had to deal with this in its many forms and manifestations. It’s the “F” word.

FAILURE. Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because of the shame. Trust me, boys—if you haven’t already tasted that, you will. I am sure most of you here already have. AND IT IS HARD. I know this firsthand, but I also know that failure was a key element to my life’s journey.

My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. I played on our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the team. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player on the squad that had not scored a point all season. So in the second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. The problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the opposing team. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight minutes of my life up until that point. Every time I got the ball, the entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen. The game ended. I had missed five shots, and the other team erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. I ran out of the gym as fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team’s players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I cried and hid in the bathroom. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team sports, but I was just too small to really compete. So in the 10th grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and weight. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was 19. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to knock their blocks off. That’s one problem with failure. It can stay with you for a very long time.

The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was in 1978. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. Now, New Orleans is an unbelievable city. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for a party that you can ever imagine. Heck, in that town, waking up was an excuse to party. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row. It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all night with a bunch of my friends. My job was to man the phone all day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New York into Mr. Tullis’ office. Around noon, things got quiet on the New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. The next thing I remember was a ruler prying my chin off my chest, and Mr. Tullis calling to me, “Paul. Paul.” My eyes fluttered opened and as I came to my senses, he said to me, “Son, you are fired.” I’d never been so shocked or hurt in my life. I literally thought I was going to die for I had just been sacked by an iconic figure in my business.

My shame turned into anger. I was not angry at Mr. Tullis for he was right. I was angry at myself. But I knew I was not a failure, and I swore that I was going to prove to myself that I could be a success. I called a friend and secured a job on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange and moved to the City. Today, I will put my work ethic up against anybody’s on Wall Street. Failure will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and sometimes it’s a really good thing. One other side note, to this day, I’ve never told my parents that I got fired. I told them I just wanted to try something different. Shame can be a lifetime companion for which you better prepare yourself.

Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in life. The first type is what I just described and comes from things you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the kind beyond your control. This happened to me in 1982. I had met a very lovely young Harvard student from Connecticut, dated her for two years then asked her to marry me right after she graduated from college. We set a date; we sent out the invitations; and all was fantastic until one month before the wedding when her father called me. He said, “Paul, my daughter sat me down this afternoon, and she doesn’t know how to tell you this, but she is really unhappy and thinks it’s time for you two to take a break.” At first I thought he was joking because he was a very funny guy. Then he said, “No, she is serious about this.” I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, I am being dumped at the altar.” I’m from Tennessee. Getting dumped at the altar was the supreme social embarrassment of that time. It was a big deal. When all my family and friends found out, they were ready to re-start the Civil War on the spot. I had to remind them that the last Civil War didn’t go so well for our side, and I didn’t like our chances in a rematch. The reality was that I was a 26-year old knucklehead, and since all my friends were getting married, I kind of felt it was time for me to do the same thing. And that was the worst reason in the world to get married. I actually think she understood that and to a certain extent spared me what would have been a very tough marriage. Instead, I’ve had an incredible marriage for twenty years to a wonderful wife, and we have four kids that I love more than anything on Earth. Some things happen to you that at the time will make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality, there is a very good reason for it. You just can’t see it and don’t know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere. Quite often that dragon of failure is really chasing you off the wrong road and on to the right one.

By now you are thinking, how much longer is this loser going to keep on talking. My kids are all teenagers, and whenever I’m telling them something I think is important, they often wonder the same thing. But the main point I want you to take away today is that some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure. This touches upon the original reason I was invited here today. In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I would pay for their college. For those of you who don’t know, Bed-Stuy is one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Even the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000 annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends, having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready for college. Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall assessment of what then was called the “I Have a Dream” Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the services our afterschool program provided. There was no difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores, teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn’t have the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics, and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would enable me to achieve those goals. What that whole experience taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city. Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our school was 98% African American boys. We never would have done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.

So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want or you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get your heart broken by the girl of your dreams or God forbid, get into an accident beyond your control. But the point is that everything happens for a reason. At the time it may not be clear. And certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and devastating. But just as sure as the sun comes up, there will come a time on the next day or the next week or the next year, when you will grab that sword and point it at that dragon and tell him, “Be gone, dragon. Tarry with me and I will cut your head off. For I must find the destination God and life hold in store for me!” Young men of Buckley, good luck on your journey…..

Shared without comment

2009-06-20T17:45:00.004+08:00

TO: vpostusa AT vpost DOT com DOT sg

My VPOST id is VPXXXXXX

I had the following 4 items meant to be delivered today

No.	Shipment No.	Merchant	Sub Merchant	Product Description	Product Value	Item Status
9	VSXXXUS	WOOT, INC		DVDS	USD 64.97	Allocated to Couriers
10	VSXXXUS	AMAZON		DVD, WATCH	USD 192.99	Allocated to Couriers
11	VSXXXUS	AMAZON		SWAROVSKI CRYSTAL BRACELET	USD 47.97	Allocated to Couriers
12	VSXXXUS	WOOT.COM		ROBOTIC VACUUM	USD 154.99	Allocated to Couriers

However, the Singpost postman delivered only 2. He claimed that the other 2 were stolen from him when he went to the toilet while the van door was left open while delivering. Apparently he HAD TO GO.

The STOLEN items are

VSXXXUS

WOOT, INC

DVDS

USD 64.97

Allocated to Couriers

VSXXXUS

WOOT.COM

ROBOTIC VACUUM

USD 154.99

Allocated to Couriers

Pls investigate and provide a refund on the item as well as shipping charges paid. I would really appreciate if a replacement item is provided by Singpost for item#12 as I got it at a huge discount when I bought it.

For verification, the postman is:

XXXXXX

Delivery vehicle: XXXXXX

Mobile#: XXXXXX

Regards

Arun

A short history of Japan and Korea

2009-05-18T12:08:00.000+08:00

Is here... highly recommended.

Geithner Plan I explained

2009-05-11T00:59:00.001+08:00

India broadband observations

2009-05-06T02:42:00.002+08:00

We get 1.4 Mbps download speed on average. DSL technology. Cost is Rs. 1000/month around SGD 32/month.

Youtube is blazing fast. Google might be having some special India caching servers.

BBC is dead slow.

PS22 Chorus VIVA LA VIDA

2009-04-29T22:33:00.001+08:00

Don't become irrelevant

2009-04-26T23:57:00.002+08:00

It has become ages since I have read CNN. The BBC gets a boit more slack as they tend to publish slightly more interesting point-of-view. Once in a while...

Readers no longer see value in hearing news. News reportin has become a commodity. CNN was not a commodity in '91 during the gulf war. Because nobody else could cover it..

But the internet has changed all that. You dont need reporters all over the world and a fancy global center in Atlanta to provide global news. The internet makes it easy to pick up news from local organisations...

Readers want solid expertise and analysis behind the news. And that comes from individual blogs...

The “Monty Hall dilemma”

2009-04-26T22:53:00.001+08:00

"Marilyn vos Savant’s column gained national notoriety in the early 1990s, thanks to her response to the “Monty Hall dilemma”: the make-or-break decision facing contestants on the game show Let’s Make a Deal that was then hosted by Hall. The question was posed by Craig Whitaker, of Columbia, Marinaland, on September 9 1990. “Dear Marilyn,” wrote Whitaker. “Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: ‘Do you want to pick door #2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?”

Savant’s answer, that it was better to switch doors, provoked an extraordinary response: thousands of letters of complaint, many of them from science teachers and academics. “There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!” wrote one reader from the University of Florida. “You are the goat!” said another. “You made a mistake, but look at the positive side,” wrote Everett Harman, of the US Army Research Institute. “If all those PhDs were wrong, the country would be in some very serious trouble.”

But Savant had not made a mistake. In the end it took her four columns, hundreds of newspaper stories and a challenge to children to test the options in classroom experiments, to convince her readers that she was right. “Oh, that was so much fun. I just enjoyed these nasty letters I got,” she said. “The audacity of people! I just loved them.”

The key to the solution lies in the role of the host, who will always pick a door which does not have a prize behind it. Statistics from the game show, in which those who switched won about twice as often as those who did not, bear out Savant’s explanation from her third column: “When you first choose door #1 from three, there’s a 1/3 chance that the prize is behind that one and a 2/3 chance that it’s behind one of the others. But then the host steps in and gives you a clue. If the prize is behind #2, the host shows you #3, and if the prize is behind #3, the host shows you #2. So when you switch, you win if the prize is behind #2 or #3. You win either way! But if you don’t switch, you win only if the prize is behind door #1.”

Band Of Horses - The Funeral

2009-04-26T20:57:00.001+08:00