August 2011
29 posts
“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.”
—
Posted via Leveraged_Dabbler
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“I think an idea is something you can write about in a science fiction book.
An invention is when you build something that people who read about it in the science fiction book said was impossible.”
” —Ideas versus inventions- Seth Godin
“You know, everybody forms his own opinion of every person. In the end, all I want is to be treated fair.”
—Michael Schumacher
Hooked to haleem →
telegraphindia.com
Haleem is available throughout the year in Calcutta and is especially made during the month of Ramazan throughout the Islamic world. The Arbi Halim, another name for low-cost beef haleem that is available all through the year, is found in most parts around Park Circus, Colootola, Chitpur and other Muslim pockets of the city. It costs only Rs 10 (it used to be Rs 7 till recently) and is a great evening snack. Made of lentils and meat and cooked for many hours, it is a rich nutritious dish. It is said that the perfect haleem is where the meat blends with the lentils and rice (or wheat in some parts) and you can’t tell the ingredients separately.
Microfinance in 2010 →
microfinance.cgap.org
2010 marks CGAP’s 15th anniversary, providing an opportunity to reflect on the state of microfinance today and CGAP’s role within it. Is microfinance a mature industry, or one still experiencing growing pains? Are the ripples of the financial crisis still spreading, and what new forces are shaping the direction of microfinance in years to come?
Steve Jobs Portraits: As much Art as Apple
View in High-Resolution to appreciate the Art in action.
iPad the Steve Jobs Diamond
Mosaic from Apple Product icons since 1998
Typo-rtrait- made entirely out of typefaces.
Psychedelic Steve
Made from 20 icons used in the iPhone
Created by Tsevis, Licensed under Creative Commons
The Tragedy of Missing Out
A father and his son went fishing on a small boat, hungry.
The father helped his son reel in his first fish, and it was a beauty. “Great catch, son,” the father said.
“Yes, but I’m worried I’m missing out on better fish,” the son said. “What if I could catch a bigger, tastier fish?”
“Maybe you should try,” the father said.
And the son did, catching an even bigger fish an hour later. “A real beaut,” the father said.
“But what if there are better fish out there?” the son asked.
“Maybe you should try,” the father said.
And the son did, catching a bigger fish, then wondering if there were better fish, catching another, and so on.
At the end of the day, the son was exhausted. The father asked, “How did the fish taste?”
The son hesitated. “I’m not sure. I was so busy looking for better fish that I didn’t taste any of them.”
The father smiled contentedly, patted his belly. “Don’t worry. They were delicious.”
“He spoke to me of poetry, art and wine. Then ruined it all with a Foursquare check in.”
—Posted by FlirtingShadows, via Naina
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
— Steve Jobs
“I will not pay attention to anything today, if I’m not likely to pay attention to it after 20 days”
—via Gauravonomics’ off-consumption experiment.
Play
Krugman: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Inflation →
feedproxy.google.com
Stop worrying and learn to love inflation, by Paul Krugman: …depression economics - the kinds of problems that characterized much of the world economy in the 1930s but have not been seen since - has staged a stunning comeback.
Five years ago hardly anybody thought that modern nations would be forced to endure bone-crushing recessions for fear of currency speculators; that a major advanced country could be persistently unable to generate enough spending to keep its workers employed; that even the Federal Reserve would worry about its ability to counter a financial market panic. The world economy has turned out to be a much more dangerous place than we imagined. For the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy - insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity - have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for much of the world. Read More
"The best way to rob a bank is to own one" →
feeds.harvardbusiness.org
There are many kinds of looting. There’s looting your local superstore — and then there’s, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there’s looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation…or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: “The best way to rob a bank is to own one.”) The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today’s world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.
