November 2011
5 posts
8 tags
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap...”
– Steve Jobs
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“Trust the young. Young people have a lot to contribute, but generation after...”
– Guy Laliberté (Cirque du Soleil creator)
October 2011
4 posts
3 tags
“I could rely on that confidence in most of the matches I was playing because...”
– Novak Djokovic
10 tags
9 tags
Film - A Jogger's Memories...please vote!
We made a beautiful short film for you to watch, love, and vote for! The “Ten Thousand Others” film is a visual journey of a jogger who realizes his fantastical link to nature and the people around him as he suffers a heart attack. Register and Vote here by Oct 23 (vote button on the right side):
http://www.tenlegs.com/item_detail&id=MTQ4OA==
Watch it in HIGH-QUALITY here!
...
September 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Work out longer
a psychology study shows that those who worked out while watching a skype video of a partner doing the same moves exercise 25 percent longer than they did while toning alone, only when the partner was about 40 percent quicker than them.
“At least 50% of women who approach me (Caine, porn business man) are hard on...”
4 tags
“If you are on facebook after 11 pm, you’re on there for the wrong...”
– GQ uk
August 2011
25 posts
4 tags
2 tags
1 tag
Pacinian - Making Virtual Touch Interfaces →
1 tag
Shitty Jobs
Since January 2009, an average 1 million fewer Americans per month have quit their jobs than in previous years. Through April, that’s 28 million Americans stuck in jobs they would have left in ordinary times.
Notably, between 30-50% of wage growth in the first 10 years of employment come from switching jobs.
photo credit: flickr / kevin durham
source: BusinessWeek
2 tags
Indians Steal Power
About 1/3 of the 174 gigawatts of electricity generated in India annually is either stolen by consumers or gets dissipated by the conductors and transmission equipment that form the distribution grid. That’s more than any other nation. Consumers string homemade wire hooks over power cables outside to take power.
photo credit: flickr / My name is Dave
source: BusinessWeek
2 tags
How to be Better
Know your weaknesses: find friends and business partners who can do things you can’t. This is hard to do, because most people only really value skills they’re good at and downplay the importance of other abilities.
Exude confidence: It’s contagious, walk into a room planning to make it happen. If you assume something is impossible, it probably is. But if you’re confident...
1 tag
Power Breakfast Yogurt
A yogurt parfait is the perfect power breakfast:
7 ounce container of 2% Greek yogurt
Quarter-cup of high-fiber organic cereal with < 5g of sugar
Piece of sliced fruit (banana)
Tablespoon of honey
Sprinkle of cinnamon
photo credit: Flickr / Mr T in DC
source: BusinessWeek
2 tags
Mormons do it best
Mormon church leaders and businessmen embrace the idea that there’s relationship between the missionary experience and success in business. For 2 years, missionaries spend 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, knocking on doors and offering The Book of Mormon to strangers often in a language missionaries barely speak. They must persuade people to listen in the face of near-constant rejection. Also,...
2 tags
Ideas to Fix U.S Economy
Canada uses a National Sales Tax. Consumption taxes are less harmful than a tax on wages (discourages work) and salaries or a tax on investment (discourages saving).
Singapore’s Jobs Credit program pays employers to keep people on the payroll until demand revives in a downturn (keeping their unemployment at 3.3%). Singapore also pays companies to train workers while they are idle instead...
2 tags
Where is Intel behind Smartphones?
For every 600 smartphones or 122 tablets running Netflix videos or Facebook updates, there’s an Intel powered server in a back office somewhere churning out date. Intel’s top Xeon server processor costs as much as $4,616 each, compared to around $15 for each smartphone chip.
source: BusinessWeek / Ian King
3 tags
Disney Brainwashing
Disney opened its first English-language academy in China in 2008, and demand for English instruction has increased so much that the company has tripled the number of its schools to 22. It’s a very efficient way of marketing their brand as well as amusement park. They’re starting years early, brainwashing Chinese children and cultivating them as potential clients in a very indirect,...
3 tags
Britannica vs Wikipedia
A 2005 study in Nature journal found that in a sample of articles, there were an average of 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.
An error in Britannica stays corrected; in Wikipedia, it may not. However, Wikipedia can cover rapidly changing events.
3 tags
Human-powered Public Transportation
Inventor Geoffrey Barnett dreamed up his human-powered monorail while living in Tokyo…to pedal above the city’s endless traffic jams. His company, Shweeb Holdings Limited received $1 million from Google to invest in research on a commuter-powered transit system in a city still to be determined.
2 tags
Blubber-heated Shacks
Antarctic research bases used to be blubber-heated shacks. Today, they’re some of the most hyperconnected, automated, self-sustaining structures on any continent.
Source: Wired - Andrew Blum
2 tags
Same-store Sales Statistic
One metric that’s frequently used is same-store sales growth, a comparison of how much each store in a big retail chain is selling compared with a year ago. If it trends up, financial pundits get excited.
The problem is, to calculate that statistic, economists remove stores that have closed from their sample.
source: Wired - Clive Thompson
2 tags
Dyson Fan Air Multiplier →
2 tags
Car maker turned Film maker
Autofuss, bought at fire-sale prices, former car-assembly droids (Fanuc s430iL) to make commercials that call for a lot of crane and dolly shots. With limber 6-axis arms and an ability to move at whiplash speeds while maintaining pinpoint accuracy, the bots are a natural for fancy camera work.
source: Wired
photo credit
3 tags
Survey of American Women
Survey of American Women
If you knew you wouldn’t be caught, would you cheat?
Yes 16%
No 84%
Have you ever had an affair?
Yes 24%
No 76%
Have you ever been cheated on?
Yes 49%
No 51%
Interesting, a straight man can only cheat on his significant other with another woman…
4 tags
“Cinematography is a game of inches. We did simple things like changing bulbs in...”
– Owen Roizman (Cinematographer - The French Connection)
2 tags
Raising Money for Films
How do you convince people to give you money for something you’ve never done?
For 9 months, my mornings all started with the same questions: Did I have meetings setup? Who hadn’t I called yet? Who had asked me to follow up with him or her? Then I would grit my teeth and jump on the phone. A wise friend once told me that he’d been fishing all his life, but only once in all those...
3 tags
“There are 3 ways to make money in a leveraged buyout - the capital structure,...”
– Bloomberg BusinessWeek - Jason Kelly
1 tag
Stocks - Realized Volatility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIX
30-day realized volatility, when slipping below 10 and stays there for at least 3 days, the S&P 500 rises 0.3% in the next month on average. Longer-term, the market recovers after that kind of volatility decrease. Over the course of a year after such a slump, the stock index rises 9.2% vs 7.4% on average.
1 tag
Easy Market Economics
Democrats support Keynes - depression-era British economist who championed government intervention to correct economic imbalances.
Republicans support Hayek - free-market Austrian School of Economics, which views government intrusion into economy as counter productive at best and socialist at worst.
Obama supports clean-energy technologies, high-speed rail and broadband internet, but not oil and...
2 tags
The Relativity Media Film Way
Relativity Media executives rely heavily on data. They use what they call a regression analysis - a computer deep-dive into dozens of variables that could affect a film’s potential performance, such as genre, release date, and actor’s appeal - before deciding to greenlight a film. The goal is to limit the company’s risk.
Relativity Media also tries to limit losses by filming in...
5 tags
“The only thing Steve Jobs has ever asked me in all the years we’ve been...”
– John Lasseter (At Pixar on Steve Jobs)
July 2011
33 posts
2 tags
Being a Boss
Do not look for consensus. Ask for volunteers. When no one volunteers, do it yourself. Then ask for volunteers again. If no one responds this time, fire someone.
Understand: everything is your fault.
4 tags
“No matter how great and high a man gets, there is always a higher tier. There is...”
– Esquire (on greatness and desire)
2 tags
“You have to prove that you are worth something. The reason you’re driven...”
– Competitors
2 tags
How you Know the Night Should End
Things that you might be talking about that are pretty solid indications that the night should end:
your crushing loneliness
how much love you have to share
how wonderful your dog is
the guy staring back at you in the mirror and how much he could’ve been if only somebody had given him a chance
Dad, how much money you make
new worries associated with rising CO2 levels
how you have to...
3 tags
Toyota vs. Oil Price Spike
Toyota lives by “jojo,” or gradually, steadily, quietly, and soon. Gas prices are high, and this time they’re going to last. When the prices of oil was spiking in the summer of 2008, officials called for suspension of gasoline tax and demands for the release of American reserves were heard everywhere.
Today, the chaos is throughout the Middle East and the problem is certainly...
1 tag
Recipe for Beer-Battered Fried Fish
Dry Mix: 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 tsp sea salt, 1/4 tsp ground black pepper, 1 pinch paprika, 1 pinch celery salt, 1 pinch ground coriander, 1 tsp baking soda.
1 cup cold beer
2 cups peanut oil
4 3-oz thin pieces of cod or haddock, skin removed, blotted with paper towel
4 oversized buns, split in half, smeared with soft butter and panfried (butter-side down) in a hot skillet until...
4 tags
The Dating Time of Year
eHarmony Labs research shows that online-dating communicative data show peaks from the day after Christmas through the end of March, and again in July, September, and October.
The Matchmaking Institute notices that people get “proactive” around the holidays, Valentine’s Day, summer, the end of summer, and early fall.
photo credit: flickr / little nora
source: Esquire
4 tags
Who You should Know Best
Yuri Milner agrees that our brain can handle only 150 stable social relationships at any given time. But while the size of our circle may not change, the mix will. Someone in China who speaks no English may be a better social connection than someone you’ve known for years. In a decade or so automatic language translation will make it seamless to communicate with new friends in China.
...
4 tags
Felix Dennis Talks
Interview with billionaire Felix Dennis (Maxim and The Week magazine):
On entrepreneurs: The percentage of people who actually get rich is very small, and the collateral damage to your life is very high. As long as you’re prepared to fail again and again first. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can succeed and make substantial sums of money if they’re prepared to make the sacrifices.
...
4 tags
Fukuoka's Citizens
The Japanese are sometimes seen as people with an island mentality, but Fukuoka’s citizens are very international and used to foreigners. Fukuoka is also an easy city to network in and the government is particularly accessible and very pro internationalisation. The cost of living is less than Tokyo or Osaka, public transport is great with easy access to the airport.
Japane has woken up to...
4 tags
Luang Prabang
Luang Prabang is a city located in north central Laos. It is known for its quality of life and is one of the most laid back places on earth.
3 tags
Marimeko Design & Colors
2 tags
words
(w) purchasing power parity - the adjustment needed on the exchange rate between two countries in order for the exchange to be equivalent based on each currency’s purchasing power…the exchange rate adjusted so an identical good in two different countries has the same price when expressed in the same currency.