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
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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.
via IBNLive : Suhasini Haidar’s Blog : It’s all relative, beta Varun.
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Dear vendors, I’m delighted to tell you that I’m a yes man! 
In business to business sales, you will encounter three kinds of people:
The vast majority, empowered to stall, to ask for more information, to delay, to send you after the broomstick of the wicked witch of the west.
A smaller population that can stall but also have the authority to say no.
A tiny portion of your meetings will be with people authorized to say yes (and some of these people are foolish enough to do the other two tasks, just for kicks).
via Seth’s Blog: License to stall.
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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.
via Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street .
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People who read Cosmopolitan magazine are very different from those who do not.
- Donald Berry, Statistics: A Bayesian Perspective
I guess something similar could be said of people who follow contemporary urdu poets.
Though I am concious of the fact that most of us have issues in understanding some of the urdu here, I am taking the liberty of posting this without translation.
(looked around but just could not find a translated version that did justice to the scale);
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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.
via Undo Sending a Gmail Message.
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The closer you get to someone, something, some brand, some organization… the harder it is to demonize it, objectify it or hate it.
So, if you want to not be hated, open up. Let people in. Engage. Interact.
via Seth’s Blog.
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Who is your hero?
by faraz on March 25, 2009
Disclaimer: I’m going to break a ground rule even before I’ve committed to a formal blog-constitution. Just this time, I will talk about politics
defined as: ‘Social relations involving intrigue to gain authority or power’
A 29 year old poet politican has been in the news lately. By definition, he would seem like a keen student of his chosen profession except that he’s not.
He’s an opportunist who says one thing, renounces it immediately, claims the credit for the underlying metphor of his alleged comments(while claiming vociferously that he meant no such thing) and then finally goes out there to say it again!
The ensuing chaos is managed effectively by suggesting that he never meant to typecast a community, he’s actually planning on being selective in arson!
The message has been delivered, the valorous poet is here, he’s got the dagger this time, the law be damned. Be scared, very scared.
It’s all a bit silly and very much of the brand of ‘politics’ that we’ve sadly come to terms with. The standard operating procedure now is to ignore such rants and move on - ’Its OK, the guy wants his votes, and the OB vans outside his house, let him have them.’
To this day I have nothing to say to the half-wit for his diabolical outburst. I am, however, shocked at a friend’s hero worship of this unfortunate politician. “Hail Varun Gandhi!” she says, I respect her emotions and the right she enjoys by virtue of our constitution to express her views, but before the public veneration, I’d like her to consider these -
I suggest we cut our hero some slack, let’s not burden him with all these expectations. He’s all of 29 and probably hasn’t seen much of our country beyond his cosy house in Delhi’s Maharani Bagh. A few ideas on how things may turn out -
To my friend: If she choses to continue her hero worship, I’d still love her the same. I’d however, like her to be original in her salutes, normal cognition makes me associate the ‘hail’ word with another famous blowhard warmonger for whom things didn’t turn out so well!
About me? I’m not impressed, not scared.
Back to pure semantics, Varun should be fine; this is ‘politics’ has come to, and he seems to be on the button. And that is just unfortunate!
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