Weekend soccer frenzy

Since I was bored at home I decided to dig into the weekend soccer matches, with every intend to bet on them. Betting increase the spectator adrenaline rush if you watch the game. Anyway, I decided to start off searching the net, the place that has it all. To my surprise, tips actually cost money. There are actually punters charging people for tips. If they are so good they might as well be a full time soccer gambler. After a little more intense searching, I found free tips -- from an arsenal fan website (who else). The tips actually do serve it's purpose. After reading them, I either agree with them or disagree with them, which gave me a direction to bet on. With 3 of my 5 matches down, I have already break even, hopefully my luck will serve me till the end of the last match. I know I am leaning here, more than just luck is required for Aston Villa to beat Liverpool.

Poker and MJ

Long weekends are great. Everyone loves them and it always seems that so much can be accomplished in a three days weekend. Of course other than typing a disgustingly boring report, I had some fun pokering and MJing. Life would suck real bad without them. Life would less bad if I hadn't lose $30 in 14 hours of gambling....

Diversity at work

I know everyone comes from very diverse background, culturally, economically and academically. My HR project was on diversity and the benefits of embracing it in wide open arms. Maybe I was too engrossed in promoting diversity at workplace, I myself totally believed in it. The joy of working in an environment where diversity thrives is something that I once looked forward to. With different inputs, ideas and perspectives, complimenting each other, great things are just waiting to be achieved. One small flaw in this hypothetical situation is the assumption that everyone one will contribute constructively. There just seem to be a special breed of people who just know how to make non constructive protests to stop work from being done, including endless excuses to not work, creating unnecessarily delays and making life difficult for everyone, in short kpkb. Sometimes I really wish these people will just shut up instead of opening their mouth. If I have the chance, I would make some minor amendments on my HR project and emphasize more on the word "constructive". This led me to another question, how did kpkb-ers get recruited in the first place.

Murphy's Law

Even when works of many dedicated, hardworking and really smart statisticians say that there's a really minute chance of an event happening, that event almost always happen. Or so it seems. Well, the famous murphy's law has been busted by Mythbusters, haven't it? So what makes murphy's law so endearing to most people? I see it this way:

When everything goes according to stats, you/me/everyone will most likely treat it as a normal occurrence and pay a normal amount of attention on it. After a few days, weeks, months... that occurrence will simply be eased from our memories to clear up spaces for more normal occurrences. What people usually remember, for a really long time are the anomalies. i.e. events when murphy's law strike. These are usually traumatic events like going all in with ACE pair only to be beaten by someone with 8 3 offsuit without even seeing the flop. These get ingrained in the memories and being really interesting stories, are retold, reiterated and refined many times over. After a few cycles, they become long lasting memories together with other ML events. If you live long enough, engaged in a little socialising, you should have gathered enough ML stories to share and when such stories are traded, everyone gets the illusion that ML events are occurring everywhere. When in actual fact, life is still very well predicted by simple and boring statistics.

The most superstitious people are gamblers. The very gist of gambling is the excitement of beating the odds. Luck is an over-rated factor here. If anyone can quantify luck, please contact me, I would love to meet you. So when weird events happen at a gambling table, superstitious ideas and really weird suggestions appear to be the most obvious thing to do. Some times, high stakes are even more powerful than intoxicants like alcohol. Don't you just love gambling.