My current iPhone game screen. As you can see, I’m quite a sucker for turn based card games.
Author Archives: Reza
A Sage’s Ramblings: A Toolbox for Modern Warfare (Part 1)
In case you’ve been living under a rock, in addition to Vintage and Legacy, we now have Modern as a new non-rotating format. In this multi-part article, I’ll be attempting the mammoth task of compiling a list of list of staples from these Modern-legal sets, partly inspired by Stephen Menendian’s Complete Vintage Checklist.
Excel: Average() and rank
My high-school batch has a football league going on the official Fantasy Football website. This year, the organizers proposed assigning points to teams representing our respective sports houses with bragging rights at the end of the season. Now, while the official league does a pretty good job at keeping track of individual scores, it doesn’t have a way to group teams into “groups” so I came up with this Excel spreadsheet.
We decided to assign 10/7/5/3 points to 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th placed houses each game week, with each house’s score each week being the average score of the top 3 performers in that house. At the end of the season, the house with the most points wins!
My initial thought process led me to think that the solution to this problem would be a combination of average() and rank(). The deliverable being, “return the average score of the top 3 teams in house X”. Turns out, rank() isn’t required at all! The solution was as follows, and must be entered using Shift+Control+Enter as it is an array formula:
If you’d like to toy around with the formulas, the excel spreadsheet is here: week1.xlsx
An Old Spice ode to London
Hello Rioters. Look at your friend, now back to me. Now at your friend, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped used petrol bombs and started using the job centre he could potentially be me. Look down, back up. Where are we? You’re at an interview with the man your friend could work for. What’s in your hand? Back at me. I have it. It’s an application form to that job you need. Look again. The form is now money. Anything is possible when you get a job, stop looting and grow up.
***
I don’t claim originality for this! First seen by Marc Penny on the “Scotland, where we don’t destroy our own city cause we’re no mongos” fan page.
Michael Lewis on Germany
Link
Michael Lewis has a new article out in Vanity Fair about Germany’s role in the financial crisis. Liar’s Poker was compulsory reading before starting off in the Bank, and the themes in his later book The Big Short resonated strongly given the assets I was trading.
London Riots
As a Londoner, the recent events have been appalling. The people involved have stopped being protesters and have turned into opportunistic looters and thieves. The scariest thing to me though, is that the riots are symptomatic of a far greater threat to our society: that of the lack of respect for authority. I think we as a society have failed to create meaningful lives for a growing underclass of individuals and that this growing resentment will continue to fester and blow up again in our faces again at some point in the future.
Here are a few pieces which I think communicate the issues pretty well:
Max Hastings from the Daily Mail:
If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame. Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped. They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.
Zoe Williams from the Guardian:
I think it’s just about possible that you could see your actions refashioned into a noble cause if you were stealing the staples: bread, milk. But it can’t be done while you’re nicking trainers, let alone laptops. In Clapham Junction, the only shop left untouched was Waterstone’s, and the looters of Boots had, unaccountably, stolen a load of Imodium. So this kept Twitter alive all night with tweets about how uneducated these people must be and the condition of their digestive systems. While that palled after a bit, it remains the case that these are shopping riots, characterised by their consumer choices: that’s the bit we’ve never seen before. A violent act by the authorities, triggering a howl of protest – that bit is as old as time. But crowds moving from shopping centre to shopping centre? Actively trying to avoid a confrontation with police, trying to get in and out of JD Sports before the “feds” arrive? That bit is new.
The Peter Principle and The Law of Crappy People
Aside
One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book, The Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions. As Andy Grove points out in his management classic High Output Management, the Peter Principle is unavoidable, because there is no way to know a priori at what level in the hierarchy a manager will be incompetent.
/via Ben’s Blog
Greetings, London!
I am now a Londoner!
Hello cold weather, Oyster cards and delays on the Tube!
My iPhone First Page
Despite what the Teh Tarik Drinker says about the majority of iPhone users being giggling teenagers, the iPhone remains one of the best phones I’ve ever used. Here’s the front page of my phone with my most frequently used apps:
A full list of apps after the jump!
Unibrow
Image
