Fascination with spoken languages

How do you like spending a year learning something and few years later only being able to talk about the subject in terms of "yeah, I studied this stuff once... don't remember anything of it now"? I'm not talking about your differential geometry course, fellows :) This happens to most people, and for me such a wasted effort is the time I spent learning Finnish (Puhutaan Suomea?). I'm genuinely fascinated with languages, but the fact that I know only 2 is a big letdown. That forgotten Finnish is a good subject for a cooler talk, but now that there's an engineer on my floor that is of Finnish origin, this maybe a chance for me to revive this lost skill.

For those of you who's learning a new language and not have a collegue to converse with, I wholehartedly recommend this tool. After all, all fancy subliminal methods can only take you so far... (Yeah, THAT is not far.) As this famous proverb says, "Repetition is the mother of study." So, go there, browse around for available lessons. Maybe enter a bunch of words that you have difficulty with. Interface is clean and simple, and does not distract from what your goal is. I was a little puzzled by the lack of controls in the "matching game". The fact that you can drag and drop matching words with a mouse guesture is a nice touch. Ah... AJAX everywhere!

Intel getting defensive

...and so are its investment partners. A whole slew of analysts are up in arms saying "sleeping giant has awaken!" and stuff. I so far fail to reconcile the following two things: poor results in last quarter are blamed on "capacity constraints" and, at the same time, Intel's inventory has grown. Huh? My explanation (I'm an interested party, you know) is, there's little demand for Intel CPUs. And I could not be happier thinking that Intel will have to discount their stuff to get rid of that inventory. So, while it seems that they are well prepared to wage a pricing war, if demand is still not there, their next quarter is going to be way worse than 8% sequential decline.

OTOH, INTC is paying dividends these days. Boring big dividend-payin' Corp... hmmm... I should consider opening a position in INTC. Say, when its below $15?

True meaning of "2 cents"

I had adsense include on my blog since September 2005. Looking at statistics, I found that average earnings per unique visitor is approximately $0.02

Interesting coincidence...

Thoughts during commute

When driving to work I often think that ther must be a physical process that models the similar situation to one of cars moving along a highway. I discarded the idea that this can be described as an electric current, even though an idea of having a fricktionless motion as in superconductivity is appealing. Reason being, I doubt that there could be waves of density in electric current.

But as a flow of a supercooled liquid or gas, this can very much be it. These models can in fact match so well, that physicists could abandon their expensive equipment and just film the traffic. Here's a stream moving steadily... Here highway expands and the distance between molecules increases. Look, here an injection of cooler, slower molecules into the stream sends waves of compression for miles back of this junction. Is it a useless idea?