Loud Thoughts

This tool makes a small dent on the surface for ease of drilling. A tap with a nail will also do the job. But if you are drilling all day long, this tool saves you from fetching the hammer and finding a nail every time.

It also saves lives. If your car plunges into the water, the best way to escape is to break the window and swim out. (You won’t be able to open the door.) How would you find a sharp object to deliver a quick blow on that piece of glass? Concerned for my family, I sought out this apparatus: eBay, local hardware stores, etc. I found a vendor quoting a price about 5% of the average selling price on eBay. Two conditions: minimum order of 500 and he is in China. Hmm…

In addition, I have a dizzy variety of customization choices: color of the punch, inscription (branding) on it, the style of packaging (none, plastic with stock-paper back, all plastic casing, etc.), insersion of a printed material or not, shipping options (boxes of 10 or whatever easy for them), etc.

For a minute or two, I dreamed of starting a business selling Automatic Center Punches. Buy here, sell there, make a bunch. All done with a simple phone. My own brand too. What should be my company’s name? Hmm…

Snap back. And I found Wall Street Journal explaining why manufacturing industry is not coming back to the US; the economy, infrastructure, and willingness to customize for a small order are forever gone. They are here in Asia, particularly China.

For decades, enterprises tried to scale up to capture the economy of scale. The art moved from vertical integration to supply-chain management. But the world has shifted to the demand side. Customers, individuals and companies alike, want it just right, just fit, just for them, one of the kinds, with style and personality. This is the era of massive customization, nano-segmentation, or whatever the new MBA buzzword for the same concept.

The equilibrium, or the optimal balance, point of this supply- and demand-side tug-of-war seems to be in China. It exists in the form of clustering: hundreds or thousands of small suppliers close to each other for the same industry. They, all anonymously together, funnel to a far fewer brands that distribute to the final paying customers. It is a complex economic organism. Nobody knows how they came together. But they used to be in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now they are in ShengZhen, SuZhou, and pretty much the entire south-eastern China.

Is this how the world is becoming? I agree with that Wall Street Journal reporter, the US has lost it already.

Day Light Saving comes with many assumptions; the key one is that it saves energy, and therefore money.

In summer, when days are long, why not go home and enjoy your lives under the bright sun: catch a short round of golf after work or walk in the park after dinner. Save energy by not turning on lights for a couple of hours. That’s very nice.

It works only for regions of certain latitudes. Daylight change very little near the equator. In polar regions, the summer days are so long that it does not matter. In both cases, daylight saving time has little, and sometime negative, effect on energy consumption.

The shifting of clock comes with some undesirable effects. People turn on air-conditioning or other cooling devices when they arrive home. If they stay outdoor, they increase the risk of getting skin cancer. Activities start at dawn will deal with darkness.

Global coordinating are bothersome since regions are inconsistent. China and the state of Arizona, for example, do not observe daylight saving at all. Most European countries do it 3 weeks later than the US. Airlines, meetings, computer software, TV schedules, etc. all must tolerate several weeks of confusion.

Record keeping is a problem too. If an event happened at 4pm 5 years ago, how many hours it has been since? Astronologists will have trouble telling your future if your birth time is off. Do you know what time will it be 30,000 hours from now? You cannot. The regional government may change how it observe daylight saving before then. Are these important? I do not know.

Can the world simply live with one and only one clock? What happens if everyone observe UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)? Does it really matter that it is 12pm when Sun is at its peak? What’s wrong with mapping “sunrise” and “dinner” to a different clock marking than 6am and 7pm? If millions of people can be taught to change clocks twice a year, they should be able to learn to have lunch when the sun is near the peak, instead of at 12pm.

What’s amusing is the choice between two obvious solutions. The government may order the society to change the clock (what was 11am is now 12pm) or change the schedule (everyone takes lunch break at 11am instead of 12pm). Both are governmental edicts. I like the latter, but the world chose former.

This 2008 election made fools out of pundits. Which of them even considered McCain just a few months ago? Bright-eyed, confident, 72-year-old, he is too pleased to see the attrition war on the other side.

Hilary definitely did not expect a bloody and exhaustive hand-to-hand battle. The party sees a classic prisoners’ dilemma: their fights to win will make the winner lose the big one and hurt the party. Is the sure-win Hilary-Obama ticket — experienced at the head and charismatic as 2nd-in-command – too obvious? The dynasty lives on when she returns to Arkansas to build the 2nd Presidential Library.

Always have facts with you. Visionaries and pundits dazzle you with grand predictions or scare you with warnings of dire consequences. You need facts for perspectives.

Find the most populous and prosperous countries in the world, and remove those only on one list. Most countries dropped off. For about 30 countries on both lists, they represent about 70% of world population and 85% of the economic production. Yes, like other markets, the world observes the 20/80 rule too: a small number of countries dominate the majority of the economic activities.

The USA is weaker, but only compared to itself several years ago. This mighty country is far and beyond the wealthiest one. Its GDP at about 32 trillions (all GDP numbers are in US dollars) is about 3 times bigger than Japan, the 2nd one on the list. The USA is 4.5 bigger than Germany, almost 5 times bigger than China, 13.4 Russian, and 14.6 India. Have no doubt. The USA will still be the #1 for several decades to come.

We all know that China and India have lots of people. Their combined 2.4 billion people (1.3 and 1.1 respectively) is about 37% of the world population. The USA, the 3rd most populous country, has about 300 millions people: less than a quarter of China.

In terms of individual productivity, the picture changes drastically. Americans, on average, produce, over 44k of value every year. For all practical purposes, it is a good substitute for their average income. UK, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Italy, and Spain are roughly in the same league with Spainairds doing about 63% of their US counter-parts. Russians produce about $7,000 every year, Chinese $2,000, and Indians $800. Average Indians make 2% of Americans and Chinese 5%. China and India literally make up with volume. Each of their citizens make very little, but the countries produce a lot.

细心看世界

事实一定要抓牢。空想家和博学者总是乐于作出令人眼花缭乱的恢宏预言或引人战栗的灾难设想。而你，则需要有事实才不会迷失。

找出世界上人口最多或最发达的那些国家，并把只占一项的国家去掉，结果就会所剩无几。同时在这两项名列前茅的国家共30个左右，他们占世界70%的人口，创造着全球85%的经济财富。是的，正如同其他市场一样，我们的世界也遵循着二八法则：少数国家支配着大部分的经济活动。

近来美国的力量有所削弱，但这也只是相对其自身几年前的情况而言。这个国家的强大绝不仅仅体现为富有。其国民生产总值达32万亿美元，这一数字是全球第二富有的国家——日本的3倍、德国的4.5倍、中国的5倍、俄罗斯的13.4倍、印度的14.6倍。毫无疑问，未来的数十年内，美国仍将继续称雄。

我们都知道中国和印度人口众多。这两个国家共有24亿人口（中国13亿，印度11亿），约占全世界人口总数的37%。而作为世界上人口数居第三位的美国，只有3亿人口，比中国的四分之一还要少。

在人均生产总值方面，国家间的差距更为悬殊。美国的年人均生产总值超过4.4万美元。人均生产总值与其人均收入大致相通。英国、加拿大、澳大利亚、法国、日本、意大利、西班牙，可以笼统地算作同美国一级别的。西班牙人均生产总值约为美国的63%，俄罗斯约为7000美元，中国为2000美元，印度则是800美元。印度和中国分别是美国的2%和5%。中印两国之所以榜上有名，究其原因是以量取胜，所以才能以如此低的人均生产总值，创造出可观的国民生产总值。

At airport, someone zoomed through the security line with a privileged air, leaving us normal people enviously curious. I observed. Impressive machines hide behind the entrance guarded by burly uniformed. “How do I?” “Have 30 minutes?” I did and could get a card like that privileged one. Excited.

“Government is finally making progresses,” I thought as I fed personal information into the machine with an appetite. Then the kiosk asked for $128 for a year’s services. “Yack!” Would company pay for this?

I walked away. Not paying that for a card that probably save me just minutes each time.

How fast was Hilary’s fall? Just a few weeks ago, she gave a hint of emotion in New Hampshire and grabbed the title of front-runner. Now press has all but declared Obama the nominee. John McCain appeared to agree too. He and Hilary are now allies: sharing the same enemy.

Since John F. Kennedy, Americans chose character over everything else in presidential elections. They watch the candidates’ faces and feel their voices. They look for not charisma, not experience, but someone who cares and is trustworthy. I talked to a young person in San Francisco bay area recently. She is a dreamy, idealistic, Berkeley democrat. I was surprised that she does not identify with a same-gender candidate and would vote for a black male. Slightly offended, she insisted her choice was based on issues. But not so, as I drilled down. Obama does not quite agree on her on several issues. In fact, on those issues she cares about, Obama and Hilary are pretty similar in their stances. Finally, she admitted, “I just don’t like Hilary.” I did not let go, “But what about her that you don’t like?”

“The lack of compentency and experience,” she said. “Can be remedied with good staff. I look at Hilary and cannot trust her.” “Do you trust McCain then?” I asked. “Yes,” she smiled wickedly. “But let’s not go there.”

Hilary is a high-caliber executive who can make tough decisions. Obama is poetic. If democrats are supposed to be dreamy and idealistic, I guess Mrs. Clinton needs to show a bit more herself to win.

I started my software engineer career constructing an Mechanical CAD software. One day, my tangential algorithm yielded a line that does not even touch the curve it is supposed to be tangent to. The graphics on the screen is off by several pixels. I was miffed. Checked and re-checked. It was not a graphics problem, my algorithm was correct, and the implementation was not buggy. That stumped me for a few days until I learned about floating point round-off errors. With just a few lines of code changed, the line snapped neatly onto the curve. That was the 1st time I learned the difference between real numbers and computerized floating point numbers.

Then I worked for Sun and met this guy (forgot his name) who was on the IEEE standard committee. All he talked about are Fortran, Inf, NaN, floating point exceptions, and those things I had no clue about. Good thing I was young and he was patient.

In pretty much all computers these days, floating point arithmetic are not precise. If a programmer is not careful, a surprising large error can happen from simple operations. Every programmer should really read the famous paper: What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic. In addition to floating point rounding off, novice programmers frequently trip on integer overflow (or underflow). Simply put, if you put two integers together and the sum is greater than what a computer can hold, it simply throws away the excessive bits and leave you with a result that can be very surprising. (Try adding 2,000,000,000 and another 2,000,000,000 to an “int32″ typed integer variable. Guess what’s the answer before running the program.)

Over a mountain of snow, on the ski lift, at Tahoe, Nevada side, I tried to converse with this young snowboarder. Ski lifts stop and go that day. It can be a long ride uphill, even longer in silence.

And it became too short. This kid (a late teenager) has her own domain; she has her own blog, photo galleries, and an on-line fiction in the works. She is adept with Photoshop, PHP, JavaScript, sound editing (so that she can PodCast), video editing (so that she can YouTube), etc. She does not know what OS the server runs. She interacts with the host server via ftp and a simple “control panel” interface. She pays for these services out of her allowance: about US$30 for 6 months.

What has this world come down to? This is an ordinary wiz kid. She has skills and resources available only to highly paid, well budgeted professionals with several years ago. Yet she believes she is just a kid trying to snowboard better. What used to be a career is now a junior’s hobby, and not even a serious one. (Her hobby is snowboarding and creative writing. Web is for keeping up with her friends.)

Am I so out of touch with the real world now? I can hear my kid teasing me, “Daddy, you are oohhld.”

I went home, registered a domain, and signed up a hosting service. I downloaded WordPress and experienced their famous 5-minute installation. I perused a large collection of themes, chose one, and customized it with simple PhotoShop and a bit PHP. After that, I imported most of my current blog entries. The whole thing took about few hours over 3 days. The theme selection and customization took the longest time.

What an experience! The kid is much less impressive and intimidating after. I have experienced, first handedly, probably a bit late, this new world I am living. I can do everything the kid did at ease (technically speaking, not content-wise or stylistically) and at the price that is negligible to all businesses. It is easy, it is cheap, it serves all purposes. The technologies have matured for the mass.

Embrace for impact.

I have been fond of gambling through-out my life, intrigued by the odds, pay-out, and strategy. Mathematics dominates this industry and plays key roles in every nuances of every game. Of course, making money with skills, strategy, and luck is addictive too.

I have seen gambling ruin people’s lives and break up families. My heart bled when a little girl waits for her mother at the slot machine 10 feet away. She cannot go near since it is against the laws. I stood by someone blaming his crying girl bad luck and asked her to leave the table. I knew mothers that spend all her time on the Mahjongg tables and leave their children unattended.

Gambling exercises self-control. I searched for instincts and toyed those tugs of tension inside of me: mathematics v. intuition, emotion v. judgment, greed v. fear, relax or focus. I often observed people around me during the game: dealers, pit boss, high roller, recreational, drunk, or even apparent gangsters. They are all fascinating, better at a distance too.

Of course, winning money is always fun.

New players fear casinos and hide in the slot machine jungle. I don’t blame them. The table games are complicated and intimidating. What is the fun of embarrassing yourself in front of strangers and lost money at the same time? But actually, they are fun (and occasional profitable) once the you’ve got the basics.

BlackJack

BlackJack is easy, fast paced, and quite fair — if you play correctly. The trick is to learn the so-called basic strategy: when to hit, stand, split, or double. Edward Thorp, an UCLA mathematics professor in the 60s, developed this strategy originally. His famous book hooked me on this game several years ago. Online resources can teach you this strategy. After mastering it, proceed to learn card-counting.

If casino catches you counting cards, you will be escorted out. The simplest card-counting, however, is effective and almost not detectable. Cards of 2, 3, 4, 5 are worth 1 point each and 10, Jack, Queen, and King are negative 1 point. Notice the cards on the table and keep track of cards that show on the table.

Use this only in single-deck games. Bet 1 unit of money when the count is zero or less. Double the bet size if the count is more than 2, quadruple if 4 or higher. For double-deck games, increase the bet only when the count reaches 4 or 8.

Craps

Craps intimidate beginners. The tables are always rowdy. Money flies across the table with incomprehensible instructions. They seem so much fun yet so mysterious.

Lewis taught me a bit and I am still experimenting, at the pace of one visit to the table a year. I now play the “pass line” and its odds, plus the place bets on 6 and 8. Let me explain:

Pay attention to a big button on the table. Enter the game when it is “Off” and put your money on the area said “Pass line.” Someone (maybe yourself) will toss two dice across the table. If the dice show 7 or 11, you win. If they are 2, 3, or 12 (called craps), you lose. For everything else, a point is established and the fun begins.

The table staff will turn the button over (On) and put it on the number. This is the time you put additional money behind the pass line next to your original bet. This is so-called “the pass line odds” bet.

Now the game has turned into a race between the established number and 7. If the dice show the number first, you win; 7 you lose. When you win, the part of the money on the pass line pays even. The money behind the pass line pays more than even, depending on which number it was. Don’t worry and just take the money.

Round up your bet to even number, give the chips to the table staff and said “place on 6.” Do the same for 8. You therefore have 2 units of money on 6 and 8. Now, whenever the dice show 6 or 8, you get 7 to 6 pay-out for the money you bet on those numbers.

This strategy works quite well for me so far. If I found a new and better one, I will share it here.

I am a big fan of The Economist. Read it religeously every week. But this recent article got me scratching my head. Who was the editor of that issue? This article argues that it is economically a bad decision for British businessmen to learn Chinese.

Three main points are in the article: China will dominate world market soon, Chinese are too hard to learn, and, lastly, elite Chinese professionals already speak English fluently. The return, therefore, does not justify the investment of time and energy.

Let’s say all three points are valid, would they draw the conclusion that learning Chinese is not fruitful? In a global market place, speed and information win. Isn’t it fearful that the other side know you better than you them? And, how come Brits found Chinese too hard and those elite Chinese are fluent in English? Are Chinese smarter? Work harder? Or they don’t look for excuses to do it?

I was in a meeting with an important partner in north-eastern China. The meeting went the normal way, all in English. Presentations, discussions, etc. At the end, action items taken, meeting wrapped up, and everyone shook hands. Just as the chairman of the company is walking out of the door, the CEO, who was just a step ahead of me, whispered something to the chairman. Instinctively, I said, in Chinese, “We can help. No problem. Give me about 2 weeks.” Without even pausing a step, the chairman patted my shoulder and told the CEO, “That’s it then.”

I cannot testify that Chinese fluency is required for a foreigner to function, or even succeed, in doing business in China. Can one win a foot-race with an extra 20-pound bag on the back? Sure! But not in Olympics.