A very good read. This is so very true.
Freakonomics also talks about this, which essentially states that anywhere there’s an information gap, there’s money to be made. You can read more about it here and here.
You have millions of people who will bust your chops for paying an extra $20 for a cell phone, but when it comes time to purchase a home they’ll overpay by thousands because they didn’t feel comfortable asking for a reduction from Mr. Nice Seller. Two years later and you’ll find them facing foreclosure while Mr. Nice Seller laughs his way to the bank.
Buying real estate is a tricky business and if you lack the gumption to stand unflinchingly by your offer, then just give up now and resign yourself to a life of renting. Because you will never, ever, in the entire history of your life, come in contact with more people personally invested in screwing you over than you will when you attempt to buy a piece of property.
I’ve seen rats in NYC, mostly (okay, almost daily) on subway tracks, once in a Korean restaurant which shall remain anonymous, and once in office -,- I don’t think they are THAT disgusting though. I even think some of them were rather cute, playing with the scraps of food and dodging subway trains. I’ll take rats over NYC cockroaches any day! (Although, I never had to catch a rat. I might have completely different feelings about ‘em then… they’re not as easy to crush with newspaper as cockroaches)
Rats, cockroaches, bedbugs… I guess they <3 NY too!
In a nutshell: Red Mango brings Italian sour-style yogurt to Korea, Pinkberry copies it, open stores in LA and NY and begets series of knockoffs Kiwiberri, Berri Good. Pinkberry thinks it invented sour frozen yogurt and sues all its competitors.
I’ve been to Pinkberry stores in k-town in LA and NYC, to be honest, it’s quite good, though WAY overpriced - about $5 for small with one topping and $7 for large. Interiors in all the stores are exactly the same glassy white plastic walls with shelves of chic stuffs from Alessi on display (not for sale, but for decor only). They are very strict about no-photography-in-the-store rule, which is total BS - I guess they are paranoid that someone will copy their business idea, just as they copied from Red Mango. If I remember correctly, franchising fee to open a store was something like $300K.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to it again. It’s pretty decent yogurt, but I do not want to support greedy businesses.
Pets manipulate the same instincts and responses that have evolved to facilitate human relationships, “primarily (but not exclusively) those between parent and child.”
…
pets are, in evolutionary terms, manipulating human responses, that they are the equivalent of social parasites.” Social parasites inject themselves into the social systems of other species and thrive there. Dogs are masters at that. They show a range of emotions—love, anxiety, curiosity—and thus trick us into thinking they possess the full range of human feelings.
Speaking of dogs and dog shows, I watched a Nova episode about dogs. According to it, dog breeders often use inbreeding in order to get the purest breed. (Hm.. wonder if the aristocrats were often incestuos for the similar reason) This makes dogs susceptible to various diseases and genetic defects. Quite disturbing, IMO…
The language of “equivalent temperatures” creates a fundamental misconception about what wind chill really means. It doesn’t tell you how cold your skin will get; that’s determined by air temperature alone. Wind chill just tells you the rate at which your skin will reach the air temperature.
No wonder wind chill of -10 didn’t feel THAT cold… :-}
BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.
ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard
MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.
CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.
PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.
CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.
STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are Annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.
ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.
GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.
OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).
RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock.
For those of you with Mac-envy (like me :D), RocketDock will nicely complement Launchy to give you Mac OS X like experience on Windows. After a few hours of using it, it’s funny how much I don’t miss Window’s Start button and task bar. And I can pretty much accomplish 90% of what I do day-to-day basis just using half-a-dozen icons on the dock. It’s memory footprint is less than 10MB! Neat-o!
One of these days, I’ll have to get a real Mac :-}
Natsuko Sone is a petite 21-year-old who stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs just 95 pounds. But she can eat 183 pieces of sushi in half an hour and down 20 pounds of food in one sitting.
Story includes video clips. Watching her eat more than 20% of her body weight in one seating is just UNREAL
I was reluctant to get a new pair of running shoes that support Nike+ when I already have a perfectly good pair. But after reading Rasmus’ blog about his experiences with Nike+, I’ve decided to get started on it using the SwitchEasy attachment — you can call it the ghetto Nike+ :D
My Nike+ sensors arrived last night, so I was anxious to test it out this morning. The weather in NYC has been brutal last couple of days, reaching below-zero with the wind chill factor, but that wouldn’t deter a gadget-lover from trying out his new toy ;-) So, here’s my first impression of the Nike+ setup:
The Good:
Idiot proof setup - typical of Apple product.
Voice feedback on a touch of a button that tells you your stats - how long, far, fast you’re currently running
Integration with personalized Nike+ website so you can sync your workout and keep track of progress (see attached image)
Now the bad:
Can’t see iPod screen when I use the Nike+ arm-band. I’ve seen third-party armbands that have clear screen though, *sigh*
Need to navigate menu to stop workout. This is a problem especially during Winter because the scroll-wheel doesn’t work well under many layers of clothing plus the gloves. It kept recording when I was post-stretching (note the dip in graph at the end of my workout). This effects the avg speed too, arrgh!
I’ll need to secure the SwitchEasy with some tape to hold it in vertical position - this is ghetto+
No way to share your progress with other people
All in all, I think the benefits out-weigh the annoyances which I’ll get used to. Just listening to iPod adds mucho enjoyment to running. Adding Nike+ really kicks it up a notch.
Here’s a nifty tool that lets will rasterize any picture and generate a PDF which you can print then piece together to make a giant poster (such as one shown above… not my room in case you’re wondering). Very cool!
A few weeks ago, Time magazine featured some really good articles that surveyed the current state of our understanding of our brain and of consciousness. This one, in particular, was very very worthwhile read. I was also very glad to find the following passage — glad to find that I am not the only one pondering about these stuff :D
CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple.
One might argue that we (people) all observe the same color, say green, because green has certain defined wavelength. But I believe our subjective experience of this wavelength must be different, and that color names are just labels we learned to associate with our experiences. For example, imagine we implant a pair of special lenses into eyes of a newly born infant, that swaps blue color with red color. As the child grows up, it will learn to associate the sky with color blue and fire with color red, when in fact we know that she’s really seeing the opposite! But who is to argue that she is seeing the opposite? We do not know how it feels to be her. As far as she’s concerned, “roses are red and violets are blue”.
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