Posted on 04 October 2008
I confess that I am a big fan of animated movies. They make me laugh. Here is a list of the cartoon characters that I find the most amusing.
Character: The roach
Movie : Wall-E
Why: Just look at the roach! PIXAR has taken care to ensure that he does everything that roaches are known to do and yet make you laugh. Just look at his antenna curled backwards. Even the body is sloped ...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
Below are my predictions for how the world is going to look like in 2020 :
1. Electric cars would form more than 75% of all cars on the roads in Europe and more than 60% in the US. However gasoline production remains at the same level and we continue to pollute more.
2. Man would have landed on Mars.
3. Voice commands become an integral feature of Windows. The keyboard will still be around but the mouse will be replaced by touchpads ...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
Real Estate can and does appreciate. And prices can drift downwards too. I would classify the factors that decide on these movements as being:
1) Local (Distance from central business district, prevailing living conditions in that area including offices, shopping malls, parks, entertainment centers, distance from major arterial roads, distance from landmarks such as airports, town halls etc.)
2) Regional or National (Growth rate of a country, Rate of unemployment, Rise in income levels, Rise in populations segment that can afford housing, ...
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Posted on 21 September 2008
One question that comes to everybody's mind when thinking of investing in a house is whether the investment will be worth it. Over the weekend I worked out a basic model that attempts to work out the financials in three different scenarios - buying a house and occupying it, buying and letting out and thirdly, not buying a house at all. Expectedly, we can see, that buying a house may turn ...
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Posted on 20 September 2008
Excel provides a way to convert the charts in an excel workbook to a webpage. To move your charts online, select the chart and use the Save as option to save the chart as a .mht/.mhtml web page. What's more, the charts on the web page are interactive....changing values in the worksheet reflect in the chart elements. A very useful, though a little cumbersome, way of publishing chart intensive dashboards, reports and ...
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Posted on 14 September 2008
Creating interactive map charts in excel is one of the easiest things to do.....that is if you know how. I recently created this map chart showing the top 50 tropical storms to hit the Unitef States since 1900. As you move ahead in time from 1900 to 2005, the map shows the states that were hit by the storm, the damage caused, storm category and rank. It takes about 5 lines ...
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Posted on 14 September 2008
The study conducted by
ethority.com points out the difference in the choice of the social networking tool across geographies. While the Germans tend to prefer SchülerVZ, Japanese prefer mixi and Russians livejournal. Facebook seems to occupy the #1 or #2 in all the geographies studied. However it would be very interesting to see their evolution over a period of time. What is certain is that the present social networks ...
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Posted on 11 September 2008
Telegeography carried out a study of the global internet traffic. Some very informative charts are available on the site including this one. The US continues to be the hub of global traffic.
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Posted on 11 September 2008
I wrote this small program that tracks the movement of the mouse in excel. The program uses an image to return the mouse X,Y coordinates. The shape that follows the mouse changes its attributes as it passes through various points in space.
You can download the file
here.
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Posted on 10 September 2008
A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: ``What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed our hospitality suite and they made rude noises during my presentation.''
The manager said: "I should have never sent ...
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Posted on 10 September 2008
A novice asked the master: ``In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call `Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying `Go, Hence!' or `Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity be?"
The master replied: ...
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Posted on 09 September 2008
WSJ ran this graph that shows the probability of a person's dying through various causes. Topping the "death chart" are heart disease (1 in 5), cancer (1 in 7), stroke (1 in 24) and motor vehicle accident (1 in 84). The probability that one will die by drowning is 144 times than being killed by flooding.
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Posted on 09 September 2008
This chart, appearing in an article titled
Earth without humans by Alan Weisman shows the time it'll take for nature to reclaim earth if humans vanish from the face of the planet today. Within 50 years, environment makes rapid progress towards recovery, in a 1000 years most man made structures will be gone and CO2 levels would be back to pre-industrial age levels. Nuclear waste however would remain upto ...
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Posted on 07 September 2008
This appeared some time back in April-2008. What is interesting to note is that not only this chart is visually appealing but it does pack a lot of data. The color of the stacks shows the % of subprime mortgaes as a % of all mortgages in an area while the height of a stack shows subprimes mortgages foreclosed as a % of all subprime mortgages in that area. If ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
On a recent trip.........
captured a masterpeice.......
...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
You can use the group and outline features in excel to create tree structures. On expanding each node the next branch becomes visible.
You can download the file
here.
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Posted on 06 September 2008
....and that's partly what got
Barrett Lyon to create this beautiful map the internet by locating each
C Class network in it. I think this has great potential. For example and as Lyon mentions on his site, if you get a chance to look at two pictures of a geographical location before and after a disruptive event takes place(like an eartquake or a Tsunami), this can give ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
In recent weeks Oil has moved down from $ 140 to $ 108. After reaching record highs, some experts now predict that oil will continue to decline and go back to normal. The trillion dollar question is WILL IT?
The price that we pay for oil today certainly seems high, especially when one compares them to what the prices have prevailed for the greater part of this century. Once the oil ...
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Posted on 04 September 2008
Mathew Bloch, Lee Byron, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox at NY Times produced this amazing visual showing the performance of movies at the box office between 1986 and 2008. Though the choice of an stacked area chart does not allow the reader to pick the numbers right off the chart but it certainly does pack a lot of information. Also check out the cool search feature!!
The Ebb and Flow of ...
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