Heard this idea from Phillip Blond here:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/big-society—philip-blond/4217882

Quote:

So, in Britain, housing benefit, for example, you know certain families will be on it for 20 years. That income stream has probably paid for the original property three times over and there’s no benefit to the tenant and there is no benefit to the government.

What if we could capitalise or front-load these sorts of benefits such that they were transformative and people were able to bounce themselves out of the situation? … What if we could front-load that, give that to the mother and she could become educated? It would give her a far greater earning power and deliver far more to the family

It is extremely frustrating to use Windows. Any basic tool that you would expect a modern OS to have is absent in Windows. In a corporate environment a PC is locked down so it is not possible to download useful uTILities at will. To use Windows productively is always a daily struggle.

Today I want to find out a md5 checksum of a file in a Windows 7 PC. Of course, md5sum is nowhere in sight.

Luckily python is available on this PC. So, I rolled my own md5sum:

I am reading ‘Predictably Irrational’ .

I have heard many of his talks so I already have some good idea what his book is about. But it still makes a very interesting read.

First couple of chapters are about price anchoring.

I suppose we can use it as a socio-psychological groundwork to explain why we have frequent financial crises.

Each financial crisis involves different markets and instruments. Each of them has unique background, fundamentals and built-up. However, it always take a crisis-scale event for the underlying structural problem to be exposed and unwind itself. A crisis serves as a publicised event to readjust everyone’s anchoring of the value and returns of the financial assets that are under distress.

The regular polyhedra are the four-sided tetrahedron, the six-sided cube, the eight-sided octahedron, the twelve-sided dodecahedron, and the twenty-sided icosahedron. Although all five types had been identified by Pythagoras two hundred years before Plato was born, they are nonetheless collectively known asplatonic solids, named in honor of Plato by the geometer Euclid.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2188

“The fact that we are experiencing a drought in 2012 comparable to the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s—without poor farming practices being partially to blame—bodes ill for the future of drought in the U.S. With human-caused global warming expected to greatly increase the intensity and frequency of great droughts like the 2012 drought in coming decades, we can expect drought to cause an increasing amount of damage and economic hardship for the U.S. “