Retailers are calling it the Coat Crisis of 2006, a fashion fiasco measured in racks of unsold fur-lined shearlings at Saks Fifth Avenue and down puffer jackets at Bloomingdale’s.
Balmy temperatures on the East Coast, with average highs this holiday season 15 degrees warmer than last year, have been disastrous for sales of all kinds of cold-weather clothing, from cashmere caps to wool scarves.
No white Christmas and no snow in sight, it’s feeling like early Winter in the middle of the season. I too, have been jogging with just a long sleeve and sometimes in shorts, like the guy mentioned in the article. The weather could not be nicer in New York, but the holiday ambiance is really lacking without any white snow.
In the past, Yahoo! has given its employees various items for Christmas, including free espresso bars on campus, duffel bags (heard it’s great for diapers), jackets (that looks like is made of mithril), …
They are doing it little differently this year. The company is letting us choose our favorite charity and it will donate $100 to that charity on our behalf. It’s sort of like re-gifting :-) There are over 2400 10,000 Yahoo’s, so… x $100 is almost a quarter of more than a million dollars! As much as I like free stuffs with our company logo, I think this is a pretty cool idea. It’s a season of giving, after all… and we get that warm fuzzy feeling in return for doing something good with free money. I’m sure that $100 will be put to lot better use whatever the charity I choose, than if it was spent on stuffs for us that will only collect dust in closets.
So… what is your favorite charity? I will seriously take your suggestions into consideration when I donate my $100 share. You can either leave a comment below, or email me directly. You can browse for charities at following sites:
Human Computation - Luis von Ahn
This is very ingenious concept. Luis von Ahn, assistant professor at CMU proposes a method in which we can tap into huge amounts of “computing” power (in people’s brains) by simply designing a clever catchy games that people will like to play. For example, esp game is a game which is used to come up with very accurate set of tags for images to enhance image search. He dreams of a world in which human and computers, each very good at certain kinds of problems that the other is bad at, can form a symbiotic relationship to solve many difficult problems in the world.
Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off? “I say no, because the plane will not move relative the the ground and air, and thus, very little air will flow over the wings. However, other people are convinced that since the wheels of a plane are free spinning, and not powered by the engines, and the engines provide thrust against the air, that somehow that makes a difference and air will flow over the wing.
What a bunch of idiots. This is a clear proof that US education in science and mathematics is so much behind rest of the world — well, I guess this is expected from a nation which invented “intelligent design”. Those who replied the plane would fly all need to take high school physics class again (ideally, in another country!)
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