Is Cyprus ready for the oil and gas exploration?

Cyprus Mail reports that “President will not be put off drilling for gas“:

“We have decided that Noble Energy will proceed in the forthcoming period with the exploratory drilling to find out the quantity and the quality of hydrocarbons,” he said.

The president added that drilling would provide clear evidence of whether potential deposits exist, something for which geological surveys have shown “the probability is very high”.

Christofias highlighted it was Cyprus’ sovereign right, based on international law and the Law of the Sea, to start gas exploration in its EEZ, underlining that “all our decisions and actions so far, stem from international law and strictly fall into this parameter”.

Given how the President handled the Mari naval base explosion, I wouldn’t trust the guy with the keys to my car, let alone drilling for gas.  I mean, I am for Cyprus benefiting from these resources and all.  But a project like that is legally, technically, financially, and politically huge.  Someone has to organize and manage that.  And current President haven’t shown any particular talent in managing anything yet.  Even of a much smaller and simpler scale.  The potential for disaster is huge here, and I don’t think Cyprus needs another one of those.  Not now, not ever.

Statistics in a time of war

John D. Cook shares this interesting piece of history:

During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!

This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.

Wald assumed that the bullets were fired randomly, that no one could accurately aim for a particular part of the bomber. Instead they aimed in the general direction of the plane and sometimes got lucky.

It stories like this one, of a practical application, that make me regret of being a bad student.  I think that more of these should be a part of a curriculum.

10 World’s Most Expensive Laptops

The other day I got into an interesting discussion with dad about laptops.  Specifically, about expensive laptops.  Using Linux, enjoying a greater utilization of any resource, and being constantly broke, I am not very versed in expensive hardware, laptop or not.  So I did a couple of Google searches to educate myself.  Here is a good lineup of the world’s most expensive laptops for the year of 2011:

  1. Luvaglio. $1,000,000.  Yeah, right.
  2. Tulip E-go Diamond. $355,000.  Girly fashion thing.
  3. Ego for Bentley. $20,000. Another girly fashion thing.
  4. Voodoo Envy H-171. $8,500. This is where the list starts getting real.
  5. Rock Xtreme SL8. $5,000.  The specs for this machine look nice.
  6. Alienware Area 51. $5,000. If I had to choose a laptop from that list, this would be the one.
  7. Lenovo Thinkpad W700DS. $4,500.  Yey! for a dual screen laptop.
  8. Toshiba Qosmio G-35-AV660. $3,500.  If I had that much money to spend on a laptop, I’d get myself a Lenovo or HP with a few extra options.
  9. Dell M6400. $3,000.  They tried to put as much as stuff in it as would fit.
  10. Acer Ferrari 1100.  $3,000. The only reason this is here, because a list of 10 items sounds better than a list of 9 items.

ifttt – if this then that is awesome

If you are somehow involved with online tools, publishing, or social networks, then you should definitely check out ifttt.  It is an abbreviation for “if this then that” and it is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. ifttt is an extremely easy, or perhaps even trivial, tool that helps you to connect and integrate web services.  Say, for example, that you use Google Reader and you want to publish your shared items to Twitter and Facebook and save starred items to Evernote or Delicious.  Can you do it? Sure, the solutions are out there.  But you will be solving each problem separately.  And good luck with technical support.  How about email or SMS integration?  Or Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar?  You probably haven’t even thought of that…

iffft has a tonne of ready made solutions.  And even if there is something that you need which is not there, you have super easy tools to make it.  All you need to do is basically choose a trigger, like a new post in the blog, a new check-in, or a new shared item, and then choose an action like publish to Twitter or Facebook.  iffft will handle the gory technical details on its own.  If there is a need to authenticate a service, you don’t have to worry about it – it is already implemented.  If you don’t like some of the defaults, you can almost always change them – for example, how the descriptions of the Google Calendar events are formed from the Foursquare check-ins.

Emails, voice calls, and SMS are supported with loads of web services and notification systems.  The interface is very clean and simple.  And everything just works.  It’s been a long while since I saw something so well designed and implemented.  Give it a try, if not for the specific functionality, then just to have more experience with good systems.

Day in brief – 2011-09-14