2 minus 1 is different from 1 minus 0

The numerical difference between 1 and 2 is the same as that between 0 and 1, but they are not the same. I cite some examples: 1. When sharing food, and there's only one piece left, nobody touches the food. Every time you take away a piece, you deprive others of having another piece. This deprivation is greatest when you take away the last piece, compared to any other pieces. Suddenly from having food in the plate, there's none left now. The more...

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What's 14 subtracted from 432?

Sorry, I just had to get this out of my head. I learnt about binary system in JC but I was very bad at it. However, that new number system is so vastly different from the current decimal one that I'm obsessed and fascinated by it at the same time. It had always been on my mind and recently more so. Did I tell you that being moody makes me ultra creative in unexpected ways? It can be in the form of art, poem, music or whatever other forms it takes....

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I played 800 games of 100 coin toss

You have to read this article before this to make sense of what I'm saying here. After putting up the probability distribution and showing that after playing 100 toss of coin, where each head gives you $2 and each tail takes away $1 from you, will not always give you a positive returns, I was still unsatisfied. I went ahead and did a monte carlo simulation of the game on excel. Using RAND() function, I will get a random value between 0 and 1....

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THAT statement is probably improbable

I saw this article from the fifth person while having mee goreng for lunch. The article talked about how you can increase your wins in investing. All in all, a good piece of article. Sound investing advice. The only complain that I have is that it's not sound mathematically. I'm being anal about this, of course, and it's all because of one word. But let's hear my arguments. You play a game of tossing a fair coin. If it shows heads, you get $2....

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Realize (the value of time)

This is a fantastic poem called Realize, author unknown. I first saw it hanging as a poster in my then girlfriend's room. This poem captured both the essence of time in the viewpoint of different people in their unique circumstances. Take this as the sequel of my previous post "Time slipping through my hands like sand". Realize ----------- To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed a final exam. To realize the value of...

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Time slipping through my hands like sand

It's nearing the end of Feb. Soon it'll be March and it'll be another quarter of 2015 gone. Just like that. It's crazy when you sit back and observe the flow of time. It's slowest when you have nothing to do and you keep looking at your watch, urging with all your mental strength for the minutes to tick by faster. It's fastest when you're the busiest, secretly wishing that time will slow down for you to do that little bit more. Since I felt that...

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Thought experiment on being FF

What will I do after I have a million dollars? A million dollar is figurative, it might not really be one million dollars. Could be 2 million. The point is, what will I do if I have the financial means not to ever work again? Quite resolutely and with much certainty, I'll continue doing what I'm doing. I don't hate my job; in fact I like it very very much. There's a lot of meaning and it brings me a lot of satisfaction and joy beyond the obvious financial gains. What I'll do is to reduce the intensity and the duration of my work hours. I think...

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Why I read blogs

My daily morning routine for the past few years had been quite constant. The first thing I do is usually to go to TheFinance.sg to read what other people are blogging about in an area of interest known as 'Personal finance' and 'Finance'. TheFinance.sg is actually a blog aggregator, which means that I just have to access one site to see a range of different sites that contributes to it, saving me a lot of time searching for similar themes and topics. Do...

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Planting a bamboo is insane

Can you imagine sitting still for years, doing the same thing again and again while waiting for the results, if any, to show? People might have called this the definition of insanity - doing the same thing again and again yet hoping for a different results. But there's exactly how a Chinese bamboo tree takes to grow. Most tree will grow steadily, so you can definitely see progress for the effort of taking care of them and watering them. The Chinese...

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How to do a 2 variable data table

I was going to teach a student business analytics, which is something I've never really done before. So far so good, it's half statistics, which I already knew but more application type of questions (instead of theoretical ones) somewhat related to making sound business decisions. The other half is about simulation and modelling using mainly excel. I've always wanted to learn the deeper end of excel but never really got the motivation to see down...

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