Twitter and Facebook can aggregate and channel people's emotions and actions.

See what their roles have been in the ongoing 'Arab Spring', which is a tectonic shift in the Arab world.

Whatever people have accused Microsoft for, it deserves a round of applause for what it has done for the successful democratization of modern computing.

'A tempest in a tea pot' is one of my favorite figures of speech. It's an excellent metaphor for not grasping the big picture hence making a fuss about something.

It's hard to escape pat generalizations.

In the eyes of Canadians, have the unions become more and more like a farce?

It's said that about 30% of Canadians are union members. That number reaches beyond my past imagination.

Well, I'm not sure if The New Yorker is a magazine with a human face, however sleek its design is.

Anyways, it's not really my cup of tea for now.

(By swanksalot / http://www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/516896919/in/photostream/ / CC)

I don't know. Usually I value depth over speed. So if a website or web app is deeply good, I can tolerate it if the loading speed is a little slow.

However, it seems that many, if not most, people, value snappy websites and web apps the most.

Perhaps the economy will be more efficient when the law can't be bought out by financiers.

It's said that for Nova Scotia, Canada, rum has served its turn well for quite a long time, since the province' people's involvement with rum-running in early 20th century.

Video - Two well-known figures wrangle with one another - Barney Frank tells CNBC's Mark Haines"This Interview is Over"

In the video clip, was the late Mr. Mark Haines reasonable enough?

美國的國品實在是有很高尚的一面。

It seems that many Westerners think that China was never a Communist country.

I made a mushroom-stuffed meatloaf last night. It seems that bread crumbs make a meatloaf less likely to crumble. And thyme, combined with parsley, can eliminate the odor of ground beef.

Next time around I'm gonna cover the baking pan with an aluminum sheet which is similar with a casserole in effect, in order to make the surface of the meatloaf tenderer.

K's son has got an ovate hairless head. :-)

One's knowledge is twofold. One part is public, the other private.

Maybe there are two sorts of schools for children.

One is those which really provide enlightenment and inspiration for kids. The other is those which just make youngsters kind of occupied and forestall problems which would occur if they were out of school.

Personally I think that 'Atwood' and 'Atwater' are two beautiful family names.

The pest of noises is hard to stand for thinkers.

What one spends time on badges what sort of person he's going to become.

I haven't seen yet a piece of information which can fully account for the stellar rise and valuation of Facebook.

For a man, the life debts he incurred in his wasted times can sneak up on him and wreak him into a regretful state.

So, it's advisable for a man to establish himself by the age of 45 or so.

I don't understand why the systems of law and accounting, well, especially that of law, are designed to be so esoteric and complicated.

Do those systems do more harm than good? Have they actually increased the business costs a lot than the case in which much simpler systems would be in place?

People nowadays are bound to educate themselves for lifelong term. But what will they learn over that long period?

I'm afraid that the predominant phenomenon of information overload strangles our thinking time.

What're the Canadian interests in Libya? Oil? Anything else?

Music video - Lady Gaga - Paparazzi

The late Michael Jackson, King of Pop, also had a song called "Paparazzi" around one decade ago, if I remember its name correctly. Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga both are quarry in the eyes of entertainment media. How sad.

Well, I think that maybe popular movies and TV series can really drive the labor market trends, whether temporary or not. It's been said that many students have applied to performing arts schools because of the American TV series "Glee".

Once a baby is born, and you take care of her or him by yourself, you'll be fettered and extremely occupied for at least two years.

I've never heard of a book that accounts the saga of the development of the web and its associated technologies.

Sometimes I feel that our modern life is so illaudably complex that people are extremely busy.

Take a look at this sentence on an advertisement flyer which RBC sent to me lately: "Finding the time to manage your household bills can be challenging and sometimes payments get missed." That sentence has struck a chord with me. It's so true. I believe that many Canadians feel the same way.

How to get our modern life simpler so that we don't have to juggle things all the time?

Should sovereignty states allow foreign capital, especially the speculative capital among it, to range on their lands?

If so, why? If not, do the states in the Second and Third World have capabilities to check the ranging foreign capital?

We are seeing the beginning of the end of the era in which the great sagacity of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs has pioneered.

American politicians often make plausible promises during elections, then fail to deliver afterwards.

Many people think that they've found out Obama belongs to the group mentioned above.

How many hypocrites are out there in this world?

I cast a wistful look over the past, and think time passed too fast.

The auspice of Samsung's continuous rise reveals South Koreans' capabilities and work ethic.

Pic - Nero

(By John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RemorsodeNero.jpg / United States public domain tag: PD-US)

Nero was an ancient Roman Emperor from 54 to 68. His notable wars included the British Revolt of 60–61 and the First Roman–Jewish War.

On another note, doesn't the once popular "Nero burning ROM" software, an optical disc burning program, have a fantastic yet provocative name? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM#Name .)

It seems that in Judaism, a human being is sinful, but he can expiate via some means.

What about in Christianity?

RIM and its critics use different extrapolations.

What the two Co-CEOs of RIM have been insisting is basically this: "look, we invented and dominated the smart phone market. We'll continue to lead the segment despite the current temporary slide in our competitive position."

On the other hand, its critics basically say, "see, RIM's market share has been sliding very rapidly since roughly two years ago. It'll continue this decline and disappear into oblivion."

You see, choosing which angle to extrapolate from is an art.

The contagion of Twitter, Facebook, and the like speeds up the transmission of information. It can speed up the dissemination of sagacity and knowledge, depending upon whether an information receiver uses his brain or not.

It may be the case that the smart gets smarter and the dumb gets dumber, in this era of social media, I suspect.

Perhaps the big Japanese electronics companies, such as Sony and Panasonic, will retreat from the TV sets market by and by.

What are they gonna focus on next? Software?

Seeking and vetting opportunities takes lots of time. But that's the price which people should pay in this world driven by competition.

If Sarah Palin ever became a president of the U.S., would she be out of her depth and the U.S. be a total mess?

There are so many wrangles in the American, Canadian, and Taiwanese parliaments. Debate, debate, debate.

It appears that democracy and wrangles go hand in hand.

I sounded several popular installed media player software programs. Among them are iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Real Player. And I still think Real Player provides the best sound quality, comparatively.

Good advertisements sort of play on people's feelings. That's a must.

Linkedin.com tends to pester users with emails about more available information which essentially are meant to remind people to use more of their services and stay longer on their website.

But hey, it'd better to stop badgering users, otherwise, they'll jump ship as soon as competitor companies emerge.

How to break the things and habits which throttle my creativity? Break through them.

I had been somewhat unmannerly in some situations in the past. Civilization comes from enlightenment and civil education, not schooling.

Some people who are in their fifties or older habitually ignore the quarry of the internet, to their own detriment.

(By Alfred Weidinger / http://www.flickr.com/photos/a-weidinger/6100934944/ / CC)

Personally I've never used Facebook much. And Facebook has never passed for some profound innovation in my mind.

Maybe I've been too numb in that arena. On the other hand, maybe I've been right in my consideration about it.

精益

精英都有
“精益求精”的

精神。

Modern life is so complex that people can't help with getting hit by stray bullets from all sorts of misfunctions of the societal and economic systems.

The stock markets tumble. Pensioners' funds lost. Whoops.
The Greeks cannot pay back their debts. Jobs creation in Canada slapped. Whoops.
On and on and on.

Complex systems, such as the societies which we live in as modern human beings, are prone to producing rounds after rounds of stray bullets. Stay out of trouble if we can. But how on earth can we?

Google+ has been brought to the fore and gaining popularity. Facebook must be a little nervous about that.

I've never grown into a fan of Facebook.

The howls of the Montreal winter blasts aren't far away.

People's feelings are seasoned.

Does the free flow of information really facilitate the free flow of intelligence?

Anyways, when the former gets strangled for some political reasons, the latter suffers.

Musty are some old residential buildings in Montreal.

In my childhood, there was a tall wooden one-bar main door in the house which my peasant grandparents on my mother's side used to live in.

The word 'wench' must be rarely used nowadays.

I'm not sure if China's REAL GDP growth rates are that gleeful, on the magnitude of 9% or so.

Shouldn't China hire an auditing firm to audit its GDP data?

The saga of the overthrowing of Gaddafi's reign in Libya by rebels has only taken about half a year to reach nearly the end.

Without the support and supply by the U.S., U.K., U.A.E. and the like, anti-Gaddafi forces such as the National Liberation Army (Libya) wouldn't be capable of mobilizing and organizing so quickly and effectively, we can guess.

Well, the global consumers' confidence in Chinese products' quality may have been gradually built up. Just don't let it be dismantled.

I don't know why the opposite of "explicit knowledge" is called "tacit knowledge" instead of "implicit knowledge".

Discern the people who voluntarily or involuntarily convey the distortion of facts.

It appears that nuclear plants reign in the energy development plan of China. Given that China's engineering and technology prowess isn't that impeccable, that may be a prescription for terrible disasters.

I'm not deeply trained in Physics at all. But Einstein's theory about Brownian motion kind of moves me.

"
If ρ(x,t) is the density of Brownian particles at point x at time t, then ρ satisfies the diffusion equation: 

 

where D is the mass diffusivity.
" 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#Einstein.27s_Theory

How will the climate change affect the situation of vegetable pests? Is there gonna be more of them or less of them?

Will EU be dismantled?

The queen, princes, and princesses of the U.K. travel the world to other Common Wealth countries every once in a while.

We can guess that the loosely connected realm provides a complementary mechanism to NATO, in terms of international defence systems.

The integers 0, 1, and 2 are sort of intuitive devices for human beings to understand and explore the nature.

The following is sort of typical in Canada, a country in which individuals' independence is stressed. Without a proper values system established in place, one becomes awry in life.

The past several years have been especially auspicious for Apple. Let's see how it will fare in its further and further pushes into overseas markets.

J drank a little whiskey to take the edge off his tiredness.

It appears that Saudi Arabia is a crucial country. It's got oil, it's rich, and it's got Mecca, the holiest city in the Islam world.

Does the trust between Damon and Pythias represent the highest level of trust between human beings?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_(mythology) for the two famous figures in ancient Greek mythology.

Canada's Jack Layton died immediately after his NDP party had risen to its peak of prominence. And Apple's Steve Jobs resigned from his CEO role just after Apple's market capitalization had been in full cry.

Life's transitoriness.

Pic - Hecate

The triple-bodied Hecate is a Graeco-Roman goddess associated with magic, sorcery, and crossroads. And it appears that she always holds one or more torches in her hand or hands.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AN00969955_001_l.jpg / Public domain picture)

My baby daughter has never gotten used to soothers.

In the word "cyber-war", the part "cyber" which qualifies "war" also increases the dimensions of the potential losses wreaked by "war".

Somerset Maugham wrote or spoke wryly, "If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts."

Well, that remark must have done tremendous good to the tourism of England, I'm positive.

Well, does Wall Street care about its black eye? How come I'm even doubtful about that?

The stooge media in a certain country dumb down its people.

So many scars and inferiority complexes had been seared into the national memory of China.

The finance industry has constantly badgered the rest of the economy into yielding to its wills. What would happen if less and less people borrowed money from the finance industry? What if the economy pattern changed away from the current model based upon credit?

Will fortune turn Turk with the white collar workers in China? Possibly.

Men typically thrash out wisdom over their life. On the other hand, what do women typically thrash out over their life? Families? Wisdom?

Having snubbed truth in the past appears to be the biggest fault of the plaintiff in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case of the alleged sexual assault.

Life's short. You can explore. But you can't stray.

It's inadvisable to party a lot.

This seems to be a women's rights statement: "Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes, no means no." What a bon mot.

It's been reported that the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been dismissed by a judge.

The veracity of the plaintiff has been cast into doubts for good measure.

Well, in some Hollywood action flicks, the brave actor hangs onto a winch which is attached to a helicopter or something and swaying in the high winds.

What is that for? For impressing the audiences. But not deeply, I suppose.

High finance runs away with the world.

Should that change?

The European economy has gradually maneuvered into dire straits.

Across the Atlantic, beside the U.S.' problems, there are more and more very rich Chinese immigrants fleeing China for Canada. Are there deep troubles in store?

Enjoyment is different than glee. Enjoying my life is different from living my life gleefully.

The interests in ancient Greek and Roman cultures remain extant among some mainland Chinese people. Mostly they access the information about those cultures via texts in Chinese.

I'm not sure if the translation supposedly from English to Chinese takes some edge off the tastes of those cultures.

Since when has the finance industry taken the mantle of ruling the whole world? Perhaps since four or so decades ago.

I guess that the universities in Israel are very auspicious.

A contradiction of marriage vow and divorcing act

The customary Roman Catholic marriage vow reads like this in English:

"Do you, ____, take , ____, to be your (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. I, ____, take you, ____, to be my (husband/wife). I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life." 

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_vows#Traditional_Roman_Catholic_vows .)

But it's a fact that some Roman Catholics do get divorced, at least in Canada. I wonder if that tends to turn them astray from their Catholic religion. After all, they broke their serious Catholic marriage vow.

We can see a lot of usage of the word "extortion" in political articles circulating the U.S. Why?

Because in biz deals, you, as an individual, can simply walk away from the deals you don't like to accept; but in political deals and arrangements you CANNOT walk away and you will be affected by them in all sorts of ways.