A movie

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Back in 1966 The Beach Boys have asked Wouldn't it be nice if we were older. I bet it would – if we could do that for a moment and then come back to our original surroundings. But here are some more thoughts –
Wouldn’t it be nice to calculate how much would it cost to enable our customers to have 2 hour time slots instead of 4 hours?
Wouldn’t it be nice to learn how many new employees you need to introduce a new line of service?
Wouldn’t it be nice to know whether you should approve a vacation request or not, making sure that your service level does not go down?
Wouldn’t it be nice to foresee the expected demand in the upcoming year and be able to plan accordingly?
Well – it is nice. Once you have the ability to automate scheduling, forecasting and planning, you also have the ability to test case scenarios and see what happens if…
What does automatic scheduling have to do with the ability to foresee how would a change of the slot window affect the business? Well that’s easy – an automatic process can be used to simulate different scenarios and compare them. It can also be used to tune the configuration so that it fits the ever changing business goals.
Integrated automatic processes, starting from forecast, going into planning, then scheduling and/or rostering and finally getting into analyzed results enables the ability to foresee how a new line of service might affect the bottom line. Wouldn’t that be nice…

The financial crisis - in a way even YOU can understand

Everybody knows about the financial crisis the world is going through, but I am sure at least some of you don't really understand why it all started, right?

Well the following article explains exactly how it all started in a way even a 14 year old 'pokemon' fan girl can understand.

Enjoy - The article

The American debt clock

The American debt is basically the amount of money owed by the American government to U.S debt instruments, such as treasury bills, bonds etc. You can read more about it here.

As of three weeks ago, the American debt passed the 10 trillion $ (!!!) mark. The interesting thing is that the American debt clock in Times Square, which shows the current debt, was not built to hold such huge numbers. As you can see in the picture, the $ sign now also holds the tens of trillions digit. Try this out for more insights.

If this recession will last as long as expected, the debt will probably increase much more, and there will be no other option but to build another clock, with a few more digits...

Amazing 20 questions on the Internet

Everybody knows the game "20 questions" in which someone chooses a figure (real or fiction) and the others need to guess who the figure is using only 20 right or wrong questions. Adapting it to the Internet looks trivial - all you need is a database of figures and questions. I already did something similar about 25 years ago, trying to guess an animal that my father/mother picked (in Basic!!!).

Well actually it is not that trivial - you need to have a very big database and find the correct questions to ask to be able to divide the vast information quickly enough so that you are able to guess the correct figure after only 20 questions.

                             

Akinator (http://www.devinettor.com/#) does it incredibly well! I played it about 10 times until I succeeded to win (meaning he couldn't guess my figure, which by the way was Doug from the time tunnel...). In the homepage you can see the last 10 games it played, and it seems that the statistics are almost always 9 to 1 (i.e. 9 out of 10 games, Akinator succeeds).

                  

You can also view the top characters that were picked from the beginning of the web site. Interestingly, this web site is played mostly by Israeli's - Bar Refaeli, Ninet Tayeb and Tzipi Livni are all in the top 10 ever... Apart from them you have You, your mother and Akinator, the 'always click on yes', 'always click on no' and 'always click on don't know'. The only non Israeli and actual named figure is Angelina Jolie. Interesting. Could it be that Brad Pit also plays here often?...

43.7

מה חשב לעצמו שאול מופז? כל אחד מאיתנו שאל את עצמו אתהשאלה הזו בשבוע האחרון. מילא לנבא שתנצח (הרי צריך להחדיר רוח קרב ואופטימיות) אבל למה לנבא בכמה? מה הסיכוי שמופז יקבל בדיוק 43.7 אחוזים מהבוחרים?

43.7

והנה, לאחר קבלת תוצאות האמת מסתבר שמופז לא היה רחוק כל כך. אולי זה אומר שאפשר להתנבא על 43.7 אחוז ולהיות מאד קרוב? בוא ננסה...

43.7

אני אומר שהסיכוי שארה"ב תבחר נשיא שחור הוא 43.7 אחוז. נשמע הגיוני, לא? אני גם חושב שהסיכוי שלבני לא תצליח להקים ממשלה ואנחנו עומדים בפני בחירות הוא 43.7. כמו כן, הסיכוי שמכבי תל אביב בכדורסל לא תיקח השנה את כל התארים בישראל הוא 43.7. בוא'נה - זה ממש כיף העניין הזה של להתנבא. אף אחד לא יכול לסתור אותך וכל מה שתגיד יהיה נכון באותה מידה שהוא לא נכון.

43.7

גאון המופז הזה...

Beware - email

If you are reading this post from an email - then I am sorry, I didn't mean to disturb. But since you are already concentrating on this, then keep on reading.

What was I doing just now?

The Sidney Morning Herald paper has published the conclusions of a research that was done in the UK, among which it was discovered that it takes roughly 64 seconds on average for someone to get back to what he was doing before a new email has popped into his inbox.

So how much time do we spend on emails?

The meaning of this is that for people who check their inbox every 5 minutes, will waste more than 8 hours a week wondering what they were doing seconds before they got an email... Think about it - 20% of the time spent at work is spent on thinking "hell, what was I doing a minute ago?". If you add to this another minute of reading and replying to emails, you get more than 50% wasted on moving into and from your inbox.

How much time does it take to reply to a message?

It was also discovered that although emails are thought to be non disturbing (especially compared to the annoying messengers), people tend to reply to emails 1 minute and 44 seconds, on average, after a new email was received.

What can we do about it?

One very simple thing is not to have an icon displayed (and of course not to have anything popping up) when an email has arrived. This small thing can lead into the ability to work without the interference of emails, at least not when you are concentrating on a specific task.

But what can we do about phone calls, SMS, messenger and calling my name in the hallway?

Maybe I will have a second post on this, depends on how much I get disturbed...

Riddle 7 - Glass balls

Here we go again - audience participation time! Yes, it's time for a new riddle. As usual, we will first review the solution to the riddle before. The solution is very basic - you just need to count the numbers from left to right... Each time we simply write down the number of appearances of the digit and the digit itself. For example, let's take the one before last row:

4 2 1 3 1 1

The first digit is 4, how many appearances? 1. Therefore we write 1 4
Now 2 which appears once, therefore 1 2
Now 1 which appears 3 times, 3 1 and last 1 3. So the result is:

1 4 1 2 3 1 1 3

The next row will be:
4 1 1 4 1 2 2 3, which is almost what Alex has wrote...


Riddle 7 - glass balls



Imagine you have a single glass ball and a 100 stories high building. You want to know what is the highest story from which you can throw the ball and still it will not shatter. Since you have only one ball, you must start from the first floor and go up one by one, or else you might find yourself with a shattered ball and no idea of the exact floor from which you can throw balls (if you had any...) and still admire the view...


So if I ask you how many trials you need in the worst case, the answer is 100. You can't do better.

But what if you had 2 balls? What is the minimal number of trials, worst case, that you need to do to find the exact spot?

What about 3 balls? 4 balls? Is there a pattern here?

The power of the blog

The internet has brought to our lives many beautiful things, such as googling and wikiing (if the verb wiki is not yet in use - well it's about time...), on-line shopping (see my new Toshiba) and of course blogging. You probably know what I am talking about (since you are reading this blog - which means you do take part in the new internet community), but have you ever wondered how much do these blogs affect our lives?

Well the following story will probably change your prespective. 

Everybody knows today who is Sarah Palin - the nominee for vice president of the republicans. If the worst-case scenario of the democrats comes to life, she will be the 45th president of the United States (and the first female president) after McCain will fall sick and will not be able to continue his presidency. But do you know how she got there? Well meet Adam Brickley. Adam is a 21 years old republican from Colarado who has never met Palin but has decided, on February 2007, way before anyone new who are going to be the nominees for presidency, that Sarah Palin should be the nominee for vice president. What did he do about this you ask? He opened a blog... http://palinforvp.blogspot.com/ According to the american press, his blog is the source from which Palin's name has come up in McCain's list for nominees. Apparently, Palin herself has phoned Brickley and thanked him for his efforts and help to become the next vice president of the United States (unless Obama somehow turns this all around - which seems to me unlikely).

So it seems that a blog can do a whole lot, doesn't it?

If Brickley can nominee a vice president - maybe I can do something about the Kadima elections? Why not?

Well - I am for Tzipi Livni, and if she does indeed get elected and become the next prime minister of Israel - you all know where you read it for the first time... :-)

How to find your favorite song

Songza is the place to look for any video clip or song you want to hear.

Its search engine enables you to look for a name of a song, of an artist or even a partial line within the song.

Once you found the songs you are looking for, you can watch their video, listen to them, buy them, share them, rate them or add them to your playlist - basically anything you'de want to do with a song...

One nice feature that makes this site stronger than searching in youtube is the ability to search while listening to the last song you've found.

As this is a music related post, I couldn't end it without a song or two from Genesis.

This is one of my favorites - the second part of Home By The Sea from the "Genesis" album in 1983.

Another great song is Firth of Fifth from their 1973 album - Selling England by the Pound:

Enjoy!

Kindle - Amazon's e-book

What is kindle?

Kindle is Amazon's digital or e-book. Kindle can replace hundreds of books, making it a very "green" product.

What's the big deal? You can read everything on the laptop?

Yes you can, but Kindle is much lighter, does not need to connect to Wi-Fi to get updates or download and has a screen specifically designed for reading. I don't know about you, but I get really tired after a few minutes of reading on my computer.

Currently, you can download books from Amazon, paying as less as 10$ for a best seller. One of the better offers of Kindle is that you don't pay for the connection/downloads. You only pay for the right to download the book.

So?

The interesting question is whether this e-book (or one of his descendants) will be able to do to regular books what the digital camera did to film camera and what the Wikipedia is doing to regular encyclopedias. It will not be a big surprise if our children will go to school with a single Kindle, holding all materials for all lessons. That's certainly much better than our sour backs from the heavy bags we had to carry around...

Riddle 6 - Numbers numbers... hint

A hint to the sixth riddle - count!

As I said, any small child who knows to count can solve this puzzle...

New Chrome Browser from Google

The new Google Chrome is out! This is a new browser from Google, which is going to battle against Internet Explorer and Firefox. Last time Google and Microsoft were battling, Google came on top with superior search engines. The interesting question now is whether Google will be able to take the lead against Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Chrome promises better performance, better integration with applications such as Gmail and Google Docs (obviously) and features coming from all known browsers. You can read more about it in the Chrome comics http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/#

This is how my blog looks like from Chrome:

When I tried to access my hotmail account throught Chrome, I got the following warning:

Upgrade your web browser

We recommend that you upgrade your web browser so you can get the most out of Windows Live Hotmail. Upgrading should only take a few minutes. To get started, choose one of the browsers below:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari

If you don’t want to upgrade right now you can still continue to Windows Live Hotmail, but some parts of it may not work and it may not be displayed properly.

Could it be that this is how Microsoft is dealing with the new rival?

Summary of the first day (it just came out yesterday) - very promising, but need to be further explored.

Plasma or LCD? I have decided

It was time to decide: plasma or LCD? My decision is not an academic one, and I cannot and don't want to convince you to do the same.

I chose LCD. Specifically, I chose this TV. The picture in the beginning is of my new TV screen.

Why? well the price was OK, Toshiba is a well known manufacturer and this TV is quite new. Why LCD? No definite answer here, but I can say that there are much more options in LCD than in Plasma, and that could be the reason I tended to go to this direction.

Anyway, if you haven't decided yet - good luck.

I'm done, at least for the next couple of years, I hope...

Riddle 6 - Numbers numbers...

And here we go again - another riddle.

But first - what's the solution to the last riddle http://omer-behindthelines.blogspot.com/2008/08/riddle-5-doorway-to-heaven.html? The answer is that you should always pick the door that was left behind and not the door you originally picked. This is because there was a 33% chance for you to be right in the first place, meaning that there was a 66% that the right door is one of the other two doors. Since the gnome has helped you to throw away one of these two doors, all the 66% chance went to the door he left behind. So there is a bigger chance that that door is the correct one.

Riddle 6 - what is the next number?
Look carefully at the following list of numbers and please write down the next one to follow:
1
1 1
2 1
1 2 1 1
3 1 1 2
1 3 2 1 1 2
3 1 1 3 2 2
2 3 2 1 2 2
4 2 1 3 1 1
1 4 1 2 3 1 1 3
???

One small hint - no need for mathematics at all, a 8 year old kid can solve this...

The McGurk Effect

What is the man in the next video saying?


Did you hear "Da Da"? Try again, this time without watching the video, only listening... This is called the McGurk effect.

In this video the phenomenon is explained:



Interesting, isn't it?
You can read more about it in here McGurk effect .


Thanks Moran and Yaron for the very interesting item.

Have you heard about the Mojave experiment?

When I first heard about this, I couldn't think about anything but the Matrix ("Do you know what's the Matrix?") or the "Dharma initiative" from Lost. Well, it has nothing to do with either of them. Basically it is just another commercial of Microsoft for the notorious Windows Vista.

So what's it all about? Microsoft claims to have done the following experiment: They interviewed more than a hundred non-Vista users that have heard about Vista and did not like what they heard. They were asked to grade Vista (giving an overall 4.4 grade on average). Then they were shown "the next Microsoft OS" codenamed "Mojave". Most of them were very impressed and liked what they saw and gave the overall 8.5 grade on average. It was then they were told that actually what they saw was Vista and nothing else.

I said Microsoft claims this. I am not accusing Microsoft of anything, but it is still a commercial and probably not a lot more. You can see for yourself in http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

And now the punch line – looking at the website and at all the screens shown (as seen above) does again make me think about "the Dharma initiative" – so maybe there is more here than meets the eye?!?

A house in Detroit was baught for 1$

Believe it or not, a house in Detroit was recently bought for 1$ (not 1 million dollars, 1 dollar)!

Just two years ago the same house was bought for 65,000$, and for the last 19 days the house was for sale for 1$ until it found a buyer.

How come? Well first of all this house is near the airport in Detroit in a poor neighborhood. Second, you probably already guessed it - the owner could not pay the mortgage and the house was taken by the bank. The bank tried to sell it since January for 1,100$ but could not find anyone interested. During this time the property started to owe debts in the size of 4,000$ and the bank decided to lower the price for 1$.

There is more. After the original owners of the house were evicted, steel thieves stole all they could from the property, including the sinks. When the bank asked a guarding company to guard the property, they put some wooden boards to protect it, but these were stolen too...

Seems like this house does not have a very promising ending.

The full (in Hebrew) article can be found here: http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=nh20080817_06

21

Yesterday I saw the movie "21" with Kevin Spacey. In the beginning of the movie he asks a student of his a riddle, which is exactly the same as riddle #5 (only with a different story). The answer gave in the movie is correct - so you can copy it if you'de like.

P.S. I didn't like the film - everything was too obvious...

Riddle 5 - doorway to heaven

It's time for a new riddle, but let's first solve the last one.

How many times do you need to break the chocolate bar to get 24 sqauares? Well I am going to show you that it doesn't matter how you break it, it will always be 23 times. How come? the simple fact is that every time you break a piece of the bar, you actually add another piece to your collection (breaking a bar creates two parts of that bar). So, if you start with 1 piece - the whole bar - then after exactly 23 breaks you will have 24 pieces - exactly the 24 squares of chocolate we wanted.

Doorway to heaven

You are standing in front of three doors.

You know that one door leads to heaven, while the other two lead to hell. You have no way of knowing which is which, and running out of time, you pick one (doesn't matter which one) and go towards it.

Suddenly there appears a gnome.

He sees that you were going to open the door you picked and says:

"I know which door leads to heaven and which don't. Believe me when I say that this door is a door to hell" and while he is saying that, he is pointing to one of the other two doors (and not to the door you chose).

The gnome tells the truth (it doesn't matter which door you picked in the first place, he will always have a door that he can point out that leads to hell), so the door he pointed out is out of the question.

The riddle is: which door should you choose now? The door you chose in the first place, or the door that the gnome has left out of the two?

There is no right door or wrong door, but maybe there is a difference in the probability between the two?