Favorite Links 5th June, 06

Hi everyone,

Welcome back to the next edition of my favorite links!!

http://www.blonnet.com/2004/08/24/stories/2004082400011100.htm - Oil Prices and World Economy! What is the impact on the Indian economy if Venezuala issues a statement saying "US acts in Iraq are condemnable. Venezula would not tolerate US bullying!" - This was actually a question in IIM-A interview! Read up that link to atleast get a basic understanding. However, I am not getting into the details of the US's relationship with Venezula - would save those links for some other day. But the interesting fact remains that around 15% of US oil imports come from Venezuela alone!

http://www.stock-market-crash.net/tulip-mania.htm - I don’t know if I have written about this before. I don’t quite remember. But for ppl starting now to take interest in stock market crashes and its impact, the tulip crash of Holland in 1630s is something like a MarketCrash 101. You should know this to see how these crashes work. And the website has further information on some good to know 'advanced' crashes like the Nick Leeson's wreckage of barings bank to the most popular Nikkei crash (I still have those memories of my childhood when I saw japanese market traders crying in the news without knowing or understanding why someone would cry if markets crash!!) or the famous Asian Market Crash ((http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes7.asp).
(For ppl who loved or tried to understand the Nick Leeson story, I have a further round of links coming out later with how rogue traders can play 'Rip You' with countries' economies in an increasingly global economy!!)


For people who are not inclined to markets and crashes and pegging of currenices to Dollars, here is something interesting from the Math world. My newest passion in terms of reading is mathematics and symbols in the ancient religions :)) Even though I am a beginner in this area, I think there is lot of interesting stuff to be unvieled. I think God manifests himself in every piece of nature that we see around and when you play around with randomness/chaos and structures, he actually appears!!

Don't believe me? Check out these links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot: I dont know if I have sent this too before but this always mesmerized me!! This is a rendering of modification of a mandelbrot set. (For the uninitiated its a part of fractal family!!)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube : Check out that link and see this : one of the two-dimensional projections of the hypercube...!! I got interested and painted this with different colors. See how it looks in the attached file!! Does it ring any bells??



And if you liked what you read about Hypercubes, its time you move on to something more interesting Platonic Solids - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid

And for all you people interested in knowing some more exotic stuff available in the world, I would suggest Wikipedia.. It ROCKS!! Actually the combined power of ppl rocks!

Favorite Links 29th May

From my mails to my BITS E-Group.

Hi All,
This is the first edition of my favorite links! The topics can be really varied as do my reading interesting based on the mood of the day to whats on my mind more often these days!! So here you go! And as they say
- World is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiig place and there are so many interesting things to know about it!! So keep at it!!

1. http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/may/29ram.htm - Ofcourse when someone voiced exactly what I thought of this topic, I couldn't but put this one up first!

2. Did you guys hear of 'The Great Famine' and 'The Great Leap' of China? These were two powerful and connected events of china that tell you a whole lot about how china views development and executes it.
Communism in china changed gears many a times and the ideologies changed... It's a very interesting topic to be kept for a longer mail at a later point!! Read these for a view of how thousands of farmers and citizens died of hunger when china thought of moving from a agricultural nation to a industrial nation!
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/16/reviews/970216.16ebersta.html
http://www.orbit6.com/crisf/misc/gr_leap.htm

3. Did you ever wonder what drug dealing as a trans-national industry look like? What does it consist of? Definitely not as many of those Don's that you see in the movies as the number of common men and women involved in the production, processing and most importantly transport of opium around the world. It's one industry that changes political equations across nations and if you thought it's a recent phenomenon, you are very faaaaaaar from truth. There is an interesting history to this very important business! And not so surprisingly, chinese were again the biggest producers at one point in time of opium!! Know about historical events like Opium wars in china??

There are a lot of sites on this topic however, my personal favorite is http://www.pa-chouvy.org/ (also www.geopium.org takes you to the same
site!)

4. And yet again, my favorite topic - Chinese blistering growth and possible impacts

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2006/gb20060516_457180.
htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981039.htm