simplicity

Stephon Curry Drains 80 Foot Buzzer Beater Video

80 foot bomb from his own foul line. Is anyone else as excited as I am about watching him in this years NCAA tournament?

The World’s 10 Wealthiest CEOs – Forbes.com

Impressed that four Indian CEO’s made the cut.

In Pictures: The World’s 10 Wealthiest CEOs

Being a CEO isn’t what it used to be. Crackdowns on corporate frills like private jets and over-the-top offices have become the norm, taking some of the fun–but none of the stress–out of running billion-dollar businesses.

While some chief executives’ jobs may be in peril, these 10 have stuck it out long enough to partake in what’s left of the global economy. These have made our annual list of the world’s wealthiest CEOs.

Source – The World’s 10 Wealthiest CEOs – Forbes.com

Google (finally) brings Gmail and Calendar offline

Very excited about this.

Jeez, I’ve been waiting a while for this one. Starting today, Google is rolling out offline support for Gmail users, which means you’ll finally be able to read and write emails even when you’re not connected to the web. A company spokesperson says users of Google’s business software package Google Apps will also be able to view their Calendar offline sometime in “the next couple of weeks.”

This move has been rumored for a long time. For example, consultant Andrew Fogg reported seeing offline versions of Gmail and Calendar back in July, and said they would be available in six weeks. That didn’t happen; perhaps bringing Gmail’s powerful search tool and gigabytes of storage offline proved more complicated than expected. Meanwhile, an hours-long Gmail outage in August illustrated the the dangers of storing all your data in the Internet cloud.

Gmail Offline uses Google’s Gears technology and must be “turned out” via Gmail Labs, where Google tests out new features. It will available in both consumer Gmail accounts and Google Apps business accounts (in some cases, your Apps domain administrator will need enable the feature) – as with other Gmail features, the rollout is random; if you don’t see it right away, it’s probably coming in a day or two

Of course, you have to wonder how Google balances Gmail’s promise that you’ll never need to delete an email again with the requirements of offline support, which involves downloading emails to your desktop. In my case, that could take up to 3 gigabytes of my hard drive. But Google says Gmail Offline only downloads some of your emails: “a good chunk of the inbox, all starred messages, ones you’re drafting, recent sent mail, etc.”

I haven’t been this excited to try out a new Google product in a long, long time. If Gmail Offline works as promised, I expect I’ll be uninstalling Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client ASAP, since I just use it as a backup for my Gmail account. I also expect many desktop email users to make the switch to Gmail, since they’ve run out of excuses to avoid it. Matt Marshall, I’m looking at you.

[photo:flickr/Lance and Erin]

Source – Google (finally) brings Gmail and Calendar offline

Star Wars A Cappella Video

I can’t even think of how to set this up, so as a result just watch.
Note: You may have to turn up the volume inside the embedded clip

Virgin: the world’s best passenger complaint letter? – Telegraph

The snippet below is from a Virgin passenger’s complaint letter to Richard Branson. In short it is bloody brilliant. If you are looking for some short-form of entertainment I highly recommend reading the entire letter as there are oodles and oodles of great lines.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this: [see image 3, above].

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

Source – Virgin: the world’s best passenger complaint letter? – Telegraph

Last House on the Left Movie Trailer | /Film

Source – Last House on the Left Movie Trailer | /Film

The real cause of the financial crisis

Interesting perspective on the financial crisis and a potential solution. I am not sure that forbidding “money management as we know it” is the only solution. But he does bring up a great point, that the incentive to compete and the thrill of gamesmanship for money managers has really created a competition where the general public, in the end, loses out.

The mathematics of probability that govern the trade-offs of risk and
reward are fundamentally counter-intuitive.

The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes outright, instead of
relying on the market to make them unprofitable, is that most people
trust their intuition, and their intuition leads them astray. If you
were to wait for the market to run its course on a pyramid scheme, the
losses could devastate a whole country, as Albanians found out a few
years ago.

In our days of outwitting casinos around the world, we have come
across many people who thought that they also had a great system, but
were in fact compulsive gamblers who eventually lost everything.
Among the false systems that intuitively feel right, there is none as
insidious and deadly as the Martingale, where a player doubles his bet
after every loss.

The Martingale system works as follows: suppose you need an extra
0. You go down to your nearest casino, and bet 0 on a hand of
blackjack, or on any other almost 50/50 proposition. Should you win
right away, you have reached your goal and gotten your money. Now if
you lose, you bet 0. If you win the second bet, you’re up 0
over all and once again successful. But a little more than one out of
four times you’ll lose both, and end up down 0. In that event you
simply bet 0. If you lose again you bet 0, and you just keep
doubling your bet until you win once. Clearly you have to win at
least once eventually, and with this system you end up with your 0
profit even if you start out losing for a while. If you’re willing to
bet up to ten times for instance, your chance of losing all ten bets
is close to one in a thousand. That means that with a probability of
almost 99.9%, you will win one of those ten bets, and therefore walk
away with your 0.

Source – The real cause of the financial crisis

John Paulson Profits in Downturn – Executive Articles – Portfolio.com

The staggering sum of money this man has made is absolutely ridiculous.

Paulson & Co.’s funds (with an estimated billion under management and growing by the day) were up a staggering billion as the markets teetered in 2007; one fund gained 590 percent, another 353 percent. All this reportedly garnered him a personal payday of .7 billion, among the biggest in history. In 2008, his funds didn’t climb nearly as much but were still successful enough to put him at the very top of his profession. By scoring returns of this magnitude, Paulson has dwarfed the success of George Soros, whose currency trades in the 1990s made him so much money that he has spent much of the rest of his career atoning for them.

Source – John Paulson Profits in Downturn – Executive Articles – Portfolio.com

J.A. Adande: Jordan’s last day as a Bull – ESPN

When I am bored I’ll spend time watching some old school Jordan highlights and commercials on YouTube. And I bet I’m not the only one.

People used to ask Jordan, in all seriousness, whether he could fly. He was compared to God. When Jordan retired that day in 1999, someone went as far as to ask whether he would use his spare time to help solve the world’s problems.

“I can’t save the world, by no means,” Jordan replied, because apparently that needed clarification.

Source – J.A. Adande: Jordan’s last day as a Bull – ESPN

Evolution of Dance 2

Judson Laipply has released ‘Evolution of Dance 2′ the sequel to one of the most viewed YouTube videos ‘Evolution of Dance‘. While this one isn’t as up to snuff as ‘EoD’, it’s still fun to watch.