Leather Cup – Youtube Promo

Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcjhL6KQMZ4 

This is my video based (mini) promo for my blog.

Hatton Knocked Out in Nevada(2nd May, 2009)

‘ Two of the most exciting rounds I’ve seen in my career’, was the opinion of Sports Illustrated writer, Chris Mannix.  Maybe a little a exaggeration on the part of Mannix, but this was certainly an exciting affair, even if it did last for less than two rounds.  Filipino Boxer, Manny Pacquiao, often touted as the best pound for pound figher in the world put on a masterclass display Saturday night against British boxer Ricky Hatton.  A series of rapid-fire right hooks put Hatton to ground in the first round, before the tie was settled in the second round with similarly quick shots that consisted of quick right hooks which set up the shattering left hook that took out the Brit. 

Hatton attempted to fight, but the classic brawling style that has seen him through his career was no match for the sheer class of Paquiano.  The Filipino proved himself to be a great fighter, while Hatton proved, in all honesty, that he wasn’t really that good.  All this defeat does is bring back memories of his defeat to Mayfeather who similarly dealt him a beating, although Hatton did put up a better display in that fight.  No arguaments, Hatton,  the International Boxing Organization’s light-welterweight champions is a very good fighter, but when good meets great, there is no contest….and this case proved to be no exception.

Pacquiao, now Light Wealter-Weight Champion has also been- lightweight, super-featherweight, light-featherweight, featherweight and flyweight champion.

Swine Flu – Why I Saw It Coming/How it Happened

why i saw it coming…SIMPLE(?).  Too many pork sausages, bacon and pork stakes….far too many innocent pigs have been slaughtered to satisfy human comsumption(greed). So it shouldn’t come as a suprise that we’ve got this new virus going about; it’s no accident.(really?)

how it happened?..not sure……hang on……..yes, yes, My inside sources tell me that a pig in Mexico(let’s call her Sarah)  flipped out and fell ill (delibrately) when she saw his best friend being marinated in barbecue sause and served in a taco wrap to some guy(let’s call him Bush).  Sarah sneezed on the taco before it was served(do pigs sneeze?) then Bush sneezed on the waiter or something and that’s how the swine flu started.(not likely).

 

I say kill Sarah.

Blogger Jailed In Iran Is Dead

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/19/iran.blogger.dead/index.html

AIG – ‘about that money we lent you..’

I’m no financial or economic expert, but there are certain issues that I figure are worth debate or at least scrutiny.  Everyone knows of the economic crisis.  Everyone has been affected by the economic crisis one way or the other.  Even if for some reason, you havn’t the slightest clue, AIG financial group certainly do, considering 1) they lost over $100 billion last year and 2) received bailout money on four occassions worth over $170 billion from the governemnt to avoid bankrupsy.  Yet they believe they have the right, in the midst of the world’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depreesion of the 1930′ s to pay out $165 million in bonuses to their chief executives. Absolutely ridiculous and a complete outrage.  There’s a ‘slightly’ bigger problem though.  Ed Liddy, CEO of AIG appeared before congress on Wedneday and was ‘put to the sword’ by both Repubicans and Democrates, fair enough.  But, even if they do reclaim most of the bonous money by taxing and placing terms on AIG’s next bailout payment, as has been suggested, it doesn’t solve the problem of $170 billion that remains unpaid.  The $165 million in bonuses is shocking, but worse is the lack of progress in breaking up the failing insurer, so that taxpayers can get back their $170 billion back.

Facebook: Best Friends Forever

Once you gather your ‘friends’ online, you can share in their lives

 

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775: Article Link

 

My blog is an online diary, but an unconventional one. I am a subscriber and avid reader of The Economist and I stumbled upon this article that I found very interesting.

 

 

Social networks

Primates on facebook

Even online, the neocortex is the limit

THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Many institutions, from neolithic villages to the maniples of the Roman army, seem to be organised around the Dunbar number. Because everybody knows everybody else, such groups can run with a minimum of bureaucracy. But that does not prove Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis is correct, and other anthropologists, such as Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth, have come up with estimates of almost double the Dunbar number for the upper limit of human groups. Moreover, sociologists also distinguish between a person’s wider network, as described by the Dunbar number or something similar, and his social “core”. Peter Marsden, of Harvard University, found that Americans, even if they socialise a lot, tend to have only a handful of individuals with whom they “can discuss important matters”. A subsequent study found, to widespread concern, that this number is on a downward trend.

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

Leather Cup: Desolation Row

this is  the lyrics to Desolation Low: http://sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Desolation-Row-lyrics-Bob-Dylan/77F817BD11117B2A482569690029360F……..look out for the words ‘leather cup’.

Leather Cup

the name of my blog derived from a Bob Dylan song called ‘Desolation Row’.  I wanted something that stood out, something that would make people think, because that’s what this blog is about. Thought.