Those who follow my Twitter/Google Plus saw that I attended the Dickens Fair this past weekend (thanks to my lovely and talented friend Felicia for telling me about it and getting my girlfriend and I comped tickets!) What is the Dickens Fair, you ask? Apparently, it’s a Bay Area tradition dating to the 1970s where [...]
I was originally going to post as if the world were “business as usual”, but it seemed too flippant and disrespectful to do so given what’s happened in Japan over the past week. This particular crisis hits very close to home not only because my employer has a significant presence in Japan, but because of [...]
I got back from my trip to Asia late last week. Like all my trips abroad (well, except that one trip to Cancun, but lets not go there…), it was very eye-opening, and I am definitely very grateful for my fund’s cross-Pacific approach for giving me a chance to build a more international perspective on [...]
The whole no internet thing really de-railed my plans on blogging one paper every month, so I’m hoping I can make up for lost time this final week of December! The paper I will talk about is from April of this year and highlights the diversity of our “gut flora” (a pleasant way to describe [...]
Very provocative headline (see title of blog post) for an interesting WSJ piece: “They are serious about making a change,” one person familiar with the matter said. Nokia board members are “supposed to make a decision by the end of the month,” that person said. They should be very serious about making a change – [...]
The past few weeks I’ve been eagerly watching a variety of Japanese television, and I noticed something very peculiar (for an American). The few Japanese dramas I’ve seen actually end. They build to an end and then just stop. They don’t drag it out for season after season, allowing different seasons to suffer based on [...]
The recent Economist piece on the situation in North Korea is simultaneously a good read and also incredibly depressing. From my read, the following chart is pretty much the “million dollar slide” which explains why the situation in North Korea is so grim: The figure highlights the bind that the US, South Korea, Japan, China, [...]
When I was in Japan a few years ago, I was astounded by the abundance of square blocks of black dots (see below) on advertising and print which I later found out were called QR codes. The concept is actually quite ingenious. A standard barcode can only store so much information in the thickness and [...]