My Virtual Display
 Random thoughts and notes to self

Title: Best Days
Artist: Graham Colton Band
Album: Here Right Now

I wanted to put this music video in a post, but it turns out the otherwise wonderful video embedding plugin I use doesn’t support AOL Video. Oh well, I had to write my own plugin…

A question from Yahoo! Answers (by Deepak Chopra, no less):

What qualities define a great team leader?

Qualities do not define a team leader; teams and their purposes do.

It is extremely naive to think that leading a team of crusaders to sack Constantinople and leading a team of research scientists to discover a polio vaccine somehow require similar qualities… Speaking of sacking Constantinople, the greatness of this particular achievement was undisputed back when it happened, but was eventually rethought…

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

If there was a chart for the economic food chain what would be the top 10 Jobs?

There are only two, really:

1. A founder (but not necessarily the CEO) of a successful large company
2. A heir to #1

Look at Forbes’ list of 24 richest people in the world: almost all fall under #1, except David Thomson (#10), a third-generation heir whose family controls The Thomson Corp. but does little in terms of day-to-day management, Liliane Bettencourt (#12), the heir to L’Oréal founder Eugene Schueller, and three members of Walton family (##22-24), all heirs to Sam Walton of WalMart fame. A few people, such as Lakshmi Mittal (#5), Bernard Arnault (#7) and the Ambani brothers (#14 and #18) are a bit of both; they did inherit a lot of money, but managed to grow it further by expanding family businesses or starting new ones.

Assume there is a computer manufacturer whose warranty and service plans for a computer selling for $1,739 are priced as follows:

• 4Yr — $340 or $10/month
• 3Yr — $260 or $7/month
• 2Yr — $170 or $5/month
• 1Yr — $70 or $2/month

All plans include in-home service, parts, labor, and 24×7 phone support (meaning, coverage levels are identical).

Question: what can you infer about the computer’s reliability (as perceived by the manufacturer) from these prices?

The real broad dollar index seems to have dropped almost all the way to historic bottom:

I wonder if this means anything… If historical patterns continue into the future, we are looking at a 95% chance of real appreciation over the next five years. But, as always, the big question is, will they continue?

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

Pluto is a very dark, cold planet. If life were discovered on Pluto, what kind of animal might live there?

What would it look like?

Describe it’s way of life.

I sincerely doubt there could be an animal on Pluto… Animals need to eat. They either eat plants or other animals (who in turn eat plants). So animals cannot exist without plants. And plants cannot exist without sunlight, which is something Pluto seriously lacks.

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

What are the working poor doing wrong that keeps them poor?

Nothing. They are basically paying for the sins of their parents. They didn’t get to go to college because they didn’t do well in high school. They didn’t do well in high school because they didn’t do well in middle and elementary school. And performance in elementary school traces back to things like parents’ education and income, child’s weight at birth, mother’s age at first childbirth, and whether parents speak English at home…

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

A Mathematician and A Physicist?

What is the basic difference between a mathematician and a physicist considering they both deal with numbers?

Let’s start with physicists. Physicists come in two flavors; theoretical physicists study material world mathematically, sometimes making predictions that certain things must happen in a certain way; experimental physicists actually build experimental installations to test the theoretical physicists’ predictions. So it is theoretical physicists who look like mathematicians sometimes.

The difference between theoretical physicists and mathematicians is that mathematicians do not need their brainwork to describe anything in the physical world (their only concern is internal consistency of their proofs), while theoretical physicists seek ways to describe the physical world mathematically and make testable predictions based on their mathematical reasoning (during the 20th century, for example, a whole slew of elementary particles were predicted by theoreticians before being discovered by experimenters).

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

Why are witches and wizards so popular these days? (eg harry potter?)?

In the past, people like them were accused and put to death?

Witches have always been popular; read a book of folk tales from any country of the world, and there will almost certainly be witches in it.

From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, witches symbolize the sacred feminine (hence, the tales of their supernatural powers). With the ascent of Christianity, however, the tales changed; the witches’ powers were no longer thought to be sacred, but diabolical.

What we are seeing today is simply the return of the normal human tradition, finally freed from the bounds wrought by St. Peter and his followers almost two thousand years ago…

A question from Yahoo! Answers:

What is the difference between communism and Totalitarianism?

They are about different things. Communism is mostly about how wealth should be distributed (the government owns all means of production, controls prices and wages, etc.) Totalitarianism is mostly about abuse of political power and oppression of dissidence; the incumbent government aggressively seeks obedience and punishes disobedience. So, while most Communist states were totalitarian to a varying degree (after you gained control of the economy, shutting up those who disagree with you is easy), there were and are plenty of non-Communist totalitarian states (Italy, Germany and Japan before 1945, post-1979 Iran, and the Abacha government in Nigeria come to mind).