squareCircleZ

Dan Brown’s 1998 effort, “Digital Fortress” was a fun read. The publishers make a big deal of his new-found fame via “The Da Vinci Code”, with the following emblazoned prominently on the cover: #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Da Vinci Code . That’s okay, but clearly his skills have improved since the [...]

I find Koizumi’s weekly mails interesting and often amusing. His latest on recycling in Japan (Koizumi Cabinet E-mail Magazine) pressed a button. I found the bit on toilets quite something (you should see Japanese toilets…!) Actually, Japan is terribly polluted – I am always amazed that visitors say what a lovely green country Japan is. [...]

There was an interesting talk by Yee Jenn Jong who is CEO of ASKnLearn, a dotcom that actually survived the crash and is now doing quite well. Yee used to be an NUS (National University of Singapore) lecturer. ASKnLearn are into LMS (learning management systems), e-learning content and IT training services. Audience observations: His warm-up [...]

“Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” by John Gray was an amusing, if somewhat repetitive read. His take is that men by nature are solitary, problem solving creatures, while women are great communicators who would rather talk at length about problems rather than going straight for a solution. Certainly I could relate to [...]

What price safety? United flight 811 out of Honolulu on 24 Feb 1989 lost a cargo door while on climb through 22000′. This caused a large rip in the side of the aircraft and 9 passengers died. The National Geographic doco on the incident was scathing in its attack on the US NTSB (National Transportation [...]

Tomorrow is finally the official start of the Kyoto Protocol – that agreement among selected countries to reduce greenhouse gases that was actually discussed in 1997. But the US and Australia, the biggest polluters in their respective hemispheres, refuse to have anything to do with it. And Kiribati, a small island in the South Pacific [...]

I finally managed to get search to work across all of squareCircleZ.com. The search boxes that appear in the blog and mathematics sections search the whole site, including the (public) photo gallery. I am using the open source phpDig – it is awesome. You can see a list of recent search items. Clicking on the [...]

When we are very busy at work, we have little energy or time left at the end of each day to get our finances in order. Then the day arrives when we start thinking about how to fund our retirement. I wish someone had sat me down when I was young and helped me on [...]

Image: Based on “Yin and Yang” fractal. An interesting example of ‘square circles’: a fractal version of the Yin and Yang symbol…

Flickr, that clever photo gallery site, has an interesting section entitled “squared circles” (you have to login first – it’s free) with some great photos that appealed to me (of course!). I’ll make a contribution one of these days… Flickr is a great site, since you can upload photos there for free and then write [...]