From Philippines, USA and Singapore to Sydney, here’s wishing you a very happy birthday!
The annual celebration will have to be put on hold. Not unlike the previous years that we can pull off a celebration of sorts, this time it will just be a virtual gathering.
Many many more birthdays to come! See you soon here in Singapore.
====================================== Pen: To all the lovely people who sent their greetings… through email, chat, Facebook comments and pokes [even virtual gifts bring good cheer!], Friendster comments and messages and here.
To Ali who baked a wonderful birthday cake. [and for, as I suspect, masterminding the entire thing with the bangles and lunch] To Mark for the lunch treat and Ines for the dinner treat. To Fabio for the steadying arm [bad wine] To Ming and her mom for the kind thoughts [and warm food!] And to Ajay, for a lot of things I can’t even begin to count how many.
All of you have made me feel really special and I thank you for sparing this soul a dash of your precious time and effort to bring cheer for me.
Love you all. [In different ways of course. To clarify, see me.]
Today marks the first day for the fans to read the last Harry Potter book. I’m still brushing up with my Order of the Phoenix via an audio book stored in my iPod (read by Stephen Fry mind you).
Here in Singapore, it seems books are selling fast too. But people can still buy ‘em and stocks are not that limited. There are lots of bookstores that I pass by earlier which has the books in piles.
Price tag is 48.05SGD that’s about more or less 1,500 pesos.
I am not in a hurry to buy one as we already ordered one in the Philippines. I’ll just settle for an ebook or an audio book if I can find one.
After a yearlong nomination and voting from the world’s populace, we now have a new and official 7 Wonders of the World. I think it’s a great endeavor and a historical landmark to have a new set of existing 7 Wonders of the World.
The 7 Ancient Wonders of the World were selected by Philon of Byzantium in 200 B.C. His selection of wonders was essentially a travel guide for fellow Athenians, and the stunning sites were all located around the Mediterranean basin, the then-known world.
The monuments he chose, to be remembered in perpetuity, were:
In a span of one month, 24 has been parodied by 2 famous cartoon shows.
SouthPark:
and Simpsons
I liked the SouthPark episode better than Simpsons’. Though Kiefer Sutherland and Mary Lynn Rajskub guest stars in Simpsons as Jack and Chloe (their 24 characters), South Park has a better parody. I especially liked the times when Cartman says “Damn it!” ala Jack Bauer.
As an additional treat, when South Park aired their episode (which has something to do with a nuke bomb hidden in Hillary’s snatch), 24 producers actually gave Matt Parker and Trey Stone – creators of Southpark – a real prop nuke suitcase bomb.
If you want to watch the two episodes, search Snuke for Southpark’s episode while Simpsons’ is season 18 episode 21.
I’m not a tennis fan per se, but I do know w ho’s who in the tennis world. Surprisingly, 3 of my current office mates are tennis fanatics so I get to be updated in the current news.
Just last Friday, one of my office mate told us that there will be a Federer-Sampras exhibition match sometime in November. To top it all, it will take place in Malaysia! Imagine this once in a lifetime oppurtunity and the chance that they will be able to watch it. I told them, if I could go with them, I would. I’d like to see a history in the making match.
Former world No. 1 Pete Sampras will take on top-ranked Roger Federer for three exhibition matches throughout Asia in November.
Fourteen-time Grand Slam winner Sampras, who retired in 2002, will play Federer in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on Nov. 22, at the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau on Nov. 24 and at a third location to be determined on Nov. 20, organizers said Wednesday.
The idea was brought about when Federer visited Sampras in LA for a friendly game. The two probably liked playing with each other so they made the bold plan.
I first had a view of this game when I watched the World Series of Poker that Ajay was watching. It’s different from the classic poker game where all cards are held by players, since in Texas Hold ‘Em some cards are laid on the table.
Anyhow, back to Sire. Using intuition and clever statistics, he formulated a model that predicted the maximum stack (earnings) a leading player will hold as well as an estimate of how long a tournament will last. Both of these he says are functions of how many initial players there are and some behavioral aspects of players that he quantifies.
How cool is that?
What is also interesting is that organisers of these tournaments figured out that the minimum bets should be made to increase exponentially as the game progresses. Sire’s model explains this perfectly. Like he says, it is amazing intuition, even sans the math approach, that the organisers are able to figure this out. Fundamental observations pay off it looks like?
The techniques he uses are typical of analysis used in evolutionary dynamics used in biology.
