chandrashekar.beingalpha.com

I am watching Season 4 of West Wing. It’s cool. Lots of powerful people, walking around making important decisions… what’s not to like! Anyway, while watching it, a thought popped up in my head.

In the show, all these extraordinarily smart people spend their time, effort and intelligence on figuring other people out! The president grapples with foreign affairs, his press secretary has to deal with the press, the campaign manager tries to read the opponent’s mind…

such a waste of time. why don’t these smart people focus themselves on bigger things… like science, perhaps.

of course, this is a naive line of thought. After all, as animals whose ultimate purpose is to survive and reproduce, that is the only measure of our “success”. So there is nothing that makes science nobler than lobbying.

but still… I couldn’t help but think that these people in the white house are wasting their talents.

I’ve heard a lot of people praise the iPhone and a lot of others diss it. I was watching this ZDNet video when I realized the iPhone’s biggest problem:

You can’t use it with one hand dammit!

If you are regular text-er (SMS-er) like I am, you will know the value of one handed typing! It is so convenient to have one hand free while you type away or search away or call away or whatever with the other.

The iPhone has a lot of cool features … but this, to me is irredeemable.

http://www.pocketchangenyc.com/speedating.aspx

Pocket Change is honoring the age old union of wealthy men and hot girls. Society has taught us to not publicly acknowledge the obvious - no longer dear friends. Women want money in a man, men want beauty in a woman – this is a factual force of nature. Women don’t ask “So, what does he do for a living?” because they’re interested in his personality and guys don’t ask “is she hot?” because they’re concerned with character. Guys know that money buys them the car, the house and the trophy wife. This genetic cleansing is how the wealthy stay beautiful.

Sweet. love the idea. maybe this’ll work in Singapore. what say y’all?

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5E9DC52B851C7128

this is the panel discussion from the CommunityNext event that happened in Silicon Valley recently. It feels like somebody just pulled me out from underneath a 100 tonnes of rubble! Over the past few days I have been feeling like an incredible dope for aspiring to do things I want to do. This panel discussion gave me validation! Its that awesome!

Somebody once made the argument that the amount of complexity in the world is proof of God’s existence. I asked her why, and this is what she said:

Look at the Mona Lisa. Look at how distinctive it is. What is the probability that something like that could have happened as the result of a random process? There must be something that made it happen! This is reflected in everything else around us. Human beings, mountains, birds… everything. All so improbable, yet is all here, like someone intended it to be here.

As convincing as this sounds, it is a fallacy. There is no point reasoning about the probability of something that has already happened. However unlikely something is, it has already happened! At each turn on the path that led us to where we are, a random process could just as well have made the decisions.

This, of course, doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist.

I’m reading a Harvard Business School case called “ZARA: Fast Fashion”. I’m cringing after reading just one page. Sentences like this one:

There was also potential for proctectionism in the questions that nongovernmental organizations and others in the delveoped countries were posing about the basic legitimact of sweatshop trade in the buyer-driven global chains such as apparel and footwear.

and this:

The global apparel chain had been characterized as a prototypical example of a buyer-driven global chain, in which profits dervied from “unique combinations of high-value research, design, sales, marketing, and financiall services that allow retailers, branded marketers, and branded manufacturers to acts as strategic brokers in linking overseas factories” with markets.

are driving me crazy!

WTF? What is the point of writing like this? The case writers are pompous jackasses!

Yup! It is happening. For details, check out: http://www.barcampsg.com

I’ll be making a presentation on Pinkomarketing (which I haven’t finished yet… damn!)

Seeya there

Update: Thanks to Yahoo! we’ll all have funky t-shirts… for FREE

Technorati: Barcamp, Singapore, Technology, Entrepreneurship, barcampsg, Barcamp Singapore, Web2.0

What is John Draper doing now?

… is technical, absolute and doesn’t leave you feeling guilty/dirty for having used a buzzword. This is inspired by a passage I read in a Pragmatic Bookshelf book.

Web 2.0 is the advent of:
1. Sites that can remember people across multiple requests, i.e. sessions (maintained using cookies). To Web 1.0 every request from a user’s browser is a new beginning.

2. Sites that can process data in the background without reloading the entire interface presented to the user (possibly asynchronously), thus behaving like desktop applications do.

Web 3.0 is a buzzword invented by a bunch of wannabes

(ok I’m just kidding. the singapore government is actually uber intelligent)