9/11: A less told story
A lesser-told story of 9/11:
The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
No bowl of soup is worth this
Gut-wrenching to watch the finning.
(If you have time, you can watch the full-length version of Gordon Ramsey: Shark Bait)
This is one aspect of Chinese culture we can do away with. And the swelling numbers of affluent mainland Chinese does not bode well for the worldwide shark population at all.
If you have not said no to shark fin soup yet, this is a good time to take a stand. It might make for some awkward wedding dinners but it also provides an opportunity to talk about this problem when people ask why you’re refusing the soup.
If we don’t start to make a difference now, they may not be around by the end of this century. No bowl of soup is worth that.
– Gordon Ramsay
What is Google? What do they sell?
Don Norman on Google:
They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’. But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.
They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.
What is intelligence, anyway?
Isaac Asimov on intelligence:
Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests – people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
…
My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Have a little faith…
(My thoughts on the Singapore Presidential Election 2011)
Don’t oppose for the sake of opposing, oppose so that Singapore will get better. It is unconstructive to try to bring about change by subverting the proper processes and it sets a bad precedent for the future.
Have faith in the opposition MPs you guys voted in. Have faith that they will do a good job of keeping the government in check.
Having the President challenge the government publicly while having no actually power to change will only divide the country.
Losing the HP way
Robert Cringely on the end of HP in all but name:
We’ve all heard how great it is that Google allows its employees to spend 10 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google didn’t invent that: HP did.
And the way the process was instituted at HP was quite formal in that the 10 percent time was after lunch on Fridays. Imagine what it must have been like on Friday afternoons in Palo Alto with every engineer working on some wild-ass idea.
Sad to see a company like HP lose it’s innovative spirit as the MBA-types took over and gutted it. I feel that the shift towards enterprise software is more a reflection of the new CEO than it is indicative of the state of the PC/mobile business.
Don’t look down
One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions.
The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.
In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.
$2.5 billion Google-Motorola break-up fee
Interesting analysis on Google’s Motorola acquisition, based on a detail of the deal that has not been widely reported.
Florian Mueller:
It takes an unusual combination of two factors that companies agree on such an extraordinary break-up fee:
There must be a buyer who, besides having deep pockets, must be completely desperate. Otherwise the seller can’t possibly command such terms.
But sellers don’t ask for terms only because they can. If sellers don’t have profound concern over the probability of the deal going through, they don’t insist on an enormous break-up fee simply because it then makes more sense for them to optimize other deal terms than this particular one.
Stock Android experience
Ben Duchac writing in Betabeat:
I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched.
Marketing manufacturer/operator-customised phones as ‘Android’ phones is somewhat misleading, because the user experience of stock Android is so different. I guess a “premium Android experience” certification is necessary for Google to boost user confidence in the Android brand.
Space Shuttle: The complete missions
As the Space Shuttle enters history after its final mission last week, here is an amazing highlight reel featuring every one of the 135 shuttle missions.
Thank you, Space Shuttle, for inspiring me towards pursuing science and engineering as I was growing up. You did a magnificent job.