ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Singapore is a gourmet's paradise, for everyone and not just for the well-to-do. Despite the cost of living being generally higher than in the neighboring countries, one can still eat well for US$2 if one knows where to go. One such place, frequented by the working class and older workers is in the district of Jalan Besar. This shop opens round-the-clock, every day of the year [except for 2 or 3 days off during Chinese new year]. All day and all night you can see a queue that overflows into the street outside the shop, hungrily waiting for the Curry Rice. I took these pictures before I left Singapore in 2005, and the sight of a plate of curry rice makes me long to go back. Pictures from top left clockwise: (1) The Curry Rice in all it's splendor [see description below for what's in it. (2) A working-class Singaporean tucking heartily into his curry rice. (3) The sign outside the Curry Rice shop, reminding patrons of it's proud history. It may look like a mess, but one s...

From Top Left clockwise: (1)Pockets of sheer delight, Tofu cakes sliced open like a Bagel and filled with: duck meat, belly pork, fish cakes, chopped Chinese sausage, prawn fritters, pig's tongue, pig's ear's, duck liver, cucumber, boiled squid. (2) The Chili sauce that you dip the Tau Kwa Pau into: a spicy, piquant mixture of chili, vinegar, the gravy from braising the pig and duck, garlic, onion and green chili [peppers]. (3) The stall: you can see the whole braised duck hanging, and other parts in the trays below. Many years ago, a hawker in Katong [a district on the Eastern side of Simgapore sold braised duck, belly pork, pig's tongue, fish balls, Chinese sausage, fried prawn fritters, duck eggs and tofu cakes. This was eaten with cucumbers, and a fantastic sauce made of chilli, vinegar,sliced green chilli, and the brown gravy left fom the braising. On some days he couldn't finish selling all his food. So he came up with the ingenious idea of chopping up all the...

:-) Thank you to the University of Kansas, the Hexacoral project at http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Hexacoral/ for the use of the beautiful animated GIF which is a visualization of Principle Component Analysis . I copied it and I hope they don't mind. This animation shows how 12 clusters of data [the different colors] are reduced to 3 Principle Components. [the 3 orthogonal vectors (perpendicular to each other)] To see the animation, click on it to view it in a new window. In a world where so much information is available, we must learn to manage information overload. When we have several data feed on the same subject, chances are that much of the information overlaps i.e. is redundant. Overlap, meaning that mathematically speaking, if you could and did draw circles representing the true information content of the each data set, the circles would overlap. This is important when we are trying to use the data to model some aspect of the real world. For example, if we are trying to analyze a...

One of the joys of living in Singapore is the wide variety of food that is readily available because of our multiracial society. It is not at all extraordinary for one to have Roti Prata for breakfast [Indian pancake eaten by dipping into a curry of lentils, vegetables and potatoes]; Nasi Padang for lunch [Malay rice with an array of many small side-dishes of meat, fish, vegetables], Chinese Claypot Chicken for dinner [ chicken, Chinese sausages, salted fish, and mushrooms cooked together in a claypot]; and Frog congee [porridge] as a late night supper. But one of the rarer cuisines of Singapore is Peranakan cuisine Peranakan is the Malay word for " descendants". Peranakan Chinese are the descendants of Chinese immigrants to the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, who came without their wives, but eventually married the local Malay women, and partially adopted their customs, cuisine and dressing. The Peranakan , also known as Baba [male] Nonya [female] or Straits Chinese deve...

* photo shows a collection of jazz archtops, seen through the locked grill door of GuitarsNJazz, a shop in Summit New Jersey, that sells only jazz archtops and jazz guitar amplifiers. If you are a jazz guitar player, I suggest you pay him a visit. He's a great guy and he gives great advice . Fact: 95 % of guitar players own more than one guitar. This is because many guitarists suffer from a disease known in guitar-playing circles as GAS or Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. GAS manifests itself as an itch which can only be temporarily relieved by the purchase of a guitar. Severe cases of GAS can make the patient accumulate more than 100 guitars. GAS has been known to be the cause of broken marriages, financial bankruptcy and unemployment. Nevertheless, there are sound reasons why guitar players have more guitars than drummers have drums, piano players have pianos and sax players have saxaphones. 1. A Steinway sounds different from a Yamaha piano. But A Fender Stratocaster sounds even mor...

The question whether technical analysis [TA] [or 'charting' as referred to by the less initiated] works has been asked many, many times. Countless studies have been done, some of which show that TA does make a significant difference, and some show that TA does not make any difference to investment performance. For more details of such studies, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis . I will use this short article just to recollect my personal experience with TA. For more than a decade, I studied TA, and tried to apply it. I studied all manner of TA from classical charting, to Candlesticks, to the hundreds of Indicators from Moving Averages, to RSI, MACD and the more esoteric ones ones that are constantly being invented. I read about Elliot Waves and Gann Charts, and how some even used astrology to analyse the markets. I delved into Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and all manner of pattern recognition, classification and forecasting techniques to feed the Pric...

During the great Depression of 1929, many railway dining cars were converted to mobile restaurants or 'diners'. Originally catering to blue-collar workers at factory sites, the Diner soon evolved to become a quintessentially American institution evoking images of a home town/ small town meeting/eating place serving typical American fare at a fair price. This is where you brought your girlfriend for a steak and a milk shake and to listen to the juke box, and this is where you met your friends for a chat after work. Or this is where the small-town police officer goes for a quick bite. You can sit at the counter, order your breakfast of two eggs sunny-side up with corned beef hash and coffee, read your newspapers and chat with the cook frying up your meal three feet away. This is also where the single-mother waitress with the stringy blonde hair who is on a first-name basis with every customer confides in you about her latest beau and you left her a big tip as consolation. Diners ...