Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Today I received an email from a friend saying that her old boss got acquainted with the basketball player Yao Ming. Suddenly, I come to realization that this is another real life example of the Six-Degrees of Separation theory.

Based on what I have gathered, I’m only four degrees away from Yao Ming.

Harry => my friend

=> my friend’s old boss

=> the current boss of my friend’s old boss

=> Yao Ming

Totally amazing! The next project is to figure out if I’m connected to Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees.

The price of oil is keeping going up, and I don’t think it will drop back to what it was any time soon. Here is something I have learned about the US oil imports:

The US imports about 4 million barrels 4 billion barrels of oil each year. For every $10 increase in the oil price (per barrel), a total of $40 million $40 billion goes to the foreign countries. If the oil price had not increased, this money would have gone into the US economy. If u don’t believe me, do the caluculation yourself.

Correction: I didn’t realize the unit used in the report is Thousand.

This is a scary news. According to a new study, “ten or more years of mobile phone use increases the risk of developing acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor on the auditory nerve.”

If this is true, I guess I should use my hand-free more often from now on. I wonder if the use of Bluetooth hand-frees could also cause tumor development?

Today a Netflix subscriber asks the netflix_operations_discussion list the following:

My friend signed up with Netflix about 2 weeks ago … I put ‘Nightmare Before Christmas” in my queue, and it says Long Wait. I asked her to put it in her queue, and it was immediately available, shipped, and I’m holding it in my hand right now. It still says Long Wait for me.

I wonder if you all put it in your queue, what will it say?

Few people on the list tried what he asked, and I was one of them. So far, 4 people have replied. Here is the result:

• Person 1 who has subcribed with Netflix for 1.5 years. Long Wait.
• Person 2 who has subscribed with Netflix for 2 years. Long Wait.
• Person 3 who has subscribed with Netflix for 0.5 years, rents movies very frequently every month. Long Wait.
• Person 4 who has subscribed with Netflix for 1.5 years, rents movies very infrequently (3-4 movies per month). Available Now!
  

French President Jacques Chirac is visiting China to discuss trades and economic links. This is a big visit. “The French president is being accompanied on his trip by senior government figures including Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and External Commerce Minister Francois Loos.”

While the French tries to be good friends with the Chinese, trying to convience the EU to lift the European arms embargo on China, helping them to build four nuclear reactors, constructing high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, the US is playing an opposite role. The US is urging the EU not to lift an embargo that was imposed. The US agree to sell Taiwan a series of defensive systems, which includes anti-ship missiles, artillery pieces, helicopters, and the advanced Patriot anti-missile system PAC-3.

Did I mention Washington is not really friendly with the French government since the beginning of the war in Iraq? Think of it, the politics behind these countries is kind of kids saying, “I don’t like to play with you because you won’t play with me. Since I have no one fun to play with, I will play with her, instead.”

To follow up on the Cheney’s domain name mix-up story, I direct you attention to this CNN article. It talks a bit more about what happened at the factcheck.com when Cheney made his mistake.

“Factcheck.com is owned by Name Administration Inc., a Cayman Islands company that acquires Web domain names and makes money off the traffic by redirecting surfers to text ads, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.”

“ When Cheney mentioned the wrong site during the debate, Name Administration officials saw nearly 50,000 visitors click on the site in the first hour, up from 200 visits a day, said the report. Employees sent traffic to the Soros site based on their own political views…”

It seems like it was a big deal for Dick Cheney to be confused about a domain name on Tuesday night’s debate.

“Defending his record as Halliburton’s chief executive, Cheney said in the Tuesday night debate that Democratic vice-presidential challenger John Edwards was trying to use Halliburton as a smokescreen. Any voter who wanted the facts, Cheney said, should check out factcheck.com.”

“Anyone who heeded Cheney’s advice and clicked on ‘factcheck.com‘ on Wednesday morning was redirected to the site of anti-Bush billionaire investor George Soros that had a banner message saying ‘Why we must not reelect President Bush‘.”

I do sympathize Cheney’s mistake. I admit sometimes the domain names are quite confusing. For a long time, I have trouble remembering PGP’s (Pretty Good Privacy) domain name. I always thought PGP being a free software should have a domain name ending with .ORG (i.e., pgp.org). In reality, “pgp.org” belongs to Pecan Grove Plantation, and the PGP web site that I was looking for is “pgp.com“. Funny!