Our golf days have an inviolable pattern: I get owned on the first nine holes! Embarrassingly, I’m almost always down by a number in the high single digit territory. Then there’s breakfast, soda and the obligatory fight-back. At close, I’m generally trailing Raza by 5, and poorer by a few balls sacrificed to driver-fade, or waterlogging at the 2nd.
Yesterday was different!
Gaurav and Manav joined in for a slack round, interrupted by conversations that were not centered around the Gaussian copula function. Those two had to leave for meetings after nine, I suspect they decided they were better CEOs than golfers! Because me and Raza are not CEOs ( just brilliant golfers!!), we continued to concentrate on the task at hand.
As we walked up to the eighteenth (par 4), I was back by two. Raza went first and hit a mean driver that went 250-275 yards. A few shots later, the day ended with my pressure putt, a 13 foot downhill shot to hold par. Raza, went two over on the hole and there it was-my Tin Cup moment, we were quits for the day!
Take up golf, it can be humbling. And that, sometimes, is a good thing!
Derived wisdom: If you’re basing your flight option calls on ‘who acquiesces to carry my golf-kit, gratis?’. You’re dangerously close to losing your job.
{Clicking on the pictures magically makes them bigger!!}
Very pretty, now let’s play!
My shoes are cyan-cyber-metallic actually!
Followed by a nervous few moments at Air Traffic Control
Followed by a nervous few moments at the lake-bed!
Product innovators dilemma: how do you build a 15 inch black tire that stands out?
If you worked in product engineering at Bridgestone, you would relate to the folks who work on the IE team at Microsoft. Internet browsers, like car tires, are a hard space to be in- it’s nearly impossible to build a truly differentiated product. Innovation is mostly centered around minute obscurities, or engineering hacks to play catch-up with competition.
You’d imagine this is not a market for insurgents, and then came Chrome.
A good example of Google’s re-imagination of the internet browser is my favorite new feature- bookmark-sync, now available on the dev-build channel.
Using the Google Docs service, Chrome now let’s you synchronize browser bookmarks across multiple computers (/devices). I think it’s a standout example of product improvement through a cloud based service (Software-backed-by-a-service?). Win7/Mesh is another great example. Give it a shot, I’m sure you’ll find it useful.
*Safari has had this feature for a while but you must pay a ransom for the MobileMe service. And, I don’t do Mac!
Here’s a master storyteller at work. I think this might be Gladwell’s finest piece, recommended reading for anyone trying to take on a bully.
This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.
2. Get him to read Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech. Chances are he’ll get inspired by it. This passage is laced with caffeine!
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
PostSecret is a fascinating community art project where ‘people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.’
A Webby Awards honoree for community impact, PostSecret is always a captivating read. They update their content every Sunday, I recommend that you take a look!
—–Accompanying Email Message—–
If you call your ex girlfriend to ask if she’s okay, our relationship will not be okay, I’m the girlfriend
In the spirit of my last post, I enjoyed reading this, recommend that you take a look:
So I want to tell Varun Gandhi, you’ve got company. That when you open your mouth to utter the most diabolical stuff ever spoken at an election rally, and use more communally charged language than has ever been heard in public – it’s probably your way of getting attention. A sound smack at a young age may have stopped you from talking openly about cutting off people’s necks and chopping off their hands. It’s the kind of typical younger child insolence that led your indulgent aunties and uncles, like the BJP leader on our channel last night to tell journalists to give him a break, he is a “young and upcoming boy.”
But let’s grow up now, beta Varun, and smell that coffee, even drink some if it clears your head. This is a parliamentary election- those speeches of yours have been heard by a shocked nation, and not even your own party knows where to look now. Your best would be to either prove that those CDs you say were doctored are indeed so; or apologise, and go into retreat or meditation, and reflect a little.
Wired has this great piece on how the Gaussian copula function was driving the looney risk-taking on Wall Street. Turns out David Li’s breakthrough function was flawed. Fascinating article, I recommend that you read the whole thing.
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.
For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
I guess this gives you 5 more seconds to think about that resignation email, you just sent!!!
If you ever send a Gmail message too early or you change your mind after you press “Send”, there’s a feature that will help you. It’s called “Undo Send” and you can find in the crowded space of experimental features from Gmail Labs.
If Paris Hilton ever ran for President, Caitlin Upton must ‘totally be her running mate. That would be like so awesome‘
“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and The Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the US should help the US or should help South Africa and should help The Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”
