Our “Just for Fun” this week is an amazing animated optical illusions. It is done only using pen and paper. No high technology is involved here.

We just found an interesting video from TheRSA.org about motivation. What motivate us? Is it money? Why so many technical people are doing open source projects (read: do something for free)? What motivates them? If you want to find the answer, watch this video….

It’s Sunday… it means it’s time for “Just for Fun”. Every Sunday, we publish a posting not related to finance or investment.

We are quite surprised recently knowing that streets near our area have a Google Maps with street view. I guess the street view data were collected recently, probably in summer last year.

Do you know how Google collects data for their street view? We have attached a video from YouTube explaining how Google collected these data. It’s a very interesting video.

Today, we’re looking at Wolfram Alpha, a computational  knowledge engine. Wolfram Alpha is a long-term project to make all systematic knowledge available for everyone.

Let’s try with a simple query, “S&P 500”. Wolfram Alpha returns something like this:

Let’s try with more complex queries, “canada inflation rate”. We’ll get something like below from Wolfram Alpha.

Finally, let’s try something more interesting, “gdp of canada compared to united states”. Surprisingly, Wolfram Alpha is able to interpret this question correctly.

Try your own queries and have fun with it.

It’s Sunday… it means it’s time for “Just for Fun”. Every Sunday, we publish a posting not related to finance or investment.

Now, let’s play a little bit with probability.

If there are 23 people in a room, what is the probability that two persons share the same birthday?

Can you believe that the probability is more than 50%? Yes… I am not kidding, the answer is 50.7%. How come? There are 365 days in a year and there are only 23 people in a room.

I was very surprise too…. Although I am not an expert in probability, I will try to explain how we get this number.

First, let’s start with a simple problem. We have 3 people in a room. What is the probability that two persons share the same birthday? Let’s take a date for the first person. The second person has probability of 1/365 to share the same birthday (we ignore leap year for simplicity). The third person also has the same probability, 1/365. We end up with 2/365.

Do we miss something? Indeed, yes. There is a probability that the second person shares the same birthday as the third person. Things are getting more complicated for 23 people.

How do we solve this problem then? We all know this formula from our class in high school:

P(two persons share the same birthday) = 1 – P(no two persons share the same birthday).

It’s easier to find the probability of no two person share the same birthday, isn’t it?

Back to our problem, let’s take a date for the first person from 23 people. The probability that the second person does not share the same birthday is 364/365. The probability of the third person is 363/365. The probability of the fourth person is 362/365, and so on. So we end up in the following equation:

P(two persons share the same birthday) = 1 – (364 / 365) * (363 / 365) * … * (343 / 365)

P(two persons share the same birthday) = 50.7%

Picture is from stock.xchng.

Today, we’re featuring Spell with flickr, a free service that allows you to compose words using images posted on flickr. Note that this is not an official flickr service.

As an example, we tried to compose the title of this blog, 1stmilliondollar; and the result looks like this:

Try your own words…

It’s Sunday… it means it’s time for “Just for Fun”. Every Sunday, we publish a posting not related to finance or investment.

Today, we are having fun with Google Translator, i.e. a free tool from Google that allows us to translate sentence or document from one language to another. It currently supports more than 50 languages.

How are we going to have fun with Google Translator? We are going to translate a sentence from English into another language. Then we’ll translate it back to English (also using Google Translator). If everything works, the result should be the same as the original sentence; at least the meaning should be unchanged. Is this going to be the case?

Let’s try with Albert Einstein’s popular quote:

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

English – German – English

If we translate this to Germany, we’ll get the following:

Wenn meine Relativitätstheorie bewährt, Deutschland wird mich als Deutscher Anspruch, und Frankreich wird erklären, dass ich ein Bürger der Welt bin. Sollte meine Theorie zu beweisen unwahr, wird Frankreich sagen, dass ich ein Deutscher bin, und Deutschland wird erklären, dass ich Jude bin.

Now, we translate the quote back to English, and we’ll get:

If proven my theory of relativity, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

The result is pretty good. Although the grammar is not perfect, but the meaning is pretty much the same.

English – Chinese – English

Now, let’s try with Chinese:

如果我的相对论被证明是成功的，德国将要求我作为德国，法国将宣布，我是世界公民。如果我的理论证明不真实的，法国会说我是德国，德国将宣布，我是犹太人。

When we translate it back to English, the result is getting more interesting:

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will ask me as Germany, France announced that I was citizen of the world. If my theory prove untrue, France will say I was in Germany, Germany will declare that I was Jewish.

The sentence becomes pretty funny, but we might still be able to guess the original sentence.

English – Indonesian – English

Last one, we try with Indonesian.

Jika teori relativitas saya terbukti berhasil, Jerman akan mengklaim saya sebagai seorang Jerman, dan Perancis akan menyatakan bahwa saya adalah seorang warga dunia. Jika teori saya terbukti benar, Prancis akan mengatakan bahwa saya seorang Jerman, dan Jerman akan menyatakan bahwa saya seorang Yahudi.

If we translate it back to English, the result doesn’t look correct. Notice that “correct” is supposed to be “untrue”; the meaning is just the opposite.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. If my theory proves correct, the French would say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

This is a video about a guy cleaning his Ferrari. Although it sounds very boring, but it you watch it until the end of the video, you might be laughing out of loud. It explains the the principle of graphical perspective in a very easy way.

How do you normally peel a banana? We just learned a trick to open a banana like a monkey from this video.

FOCUS has recently published an image showing best jobs in America. It shows the median salary, top pay as well as Top 50 Rank. Just click the image below to see the full image.

• Highest median salary: Emergency Room Physician – $249,000
• Highest top salary: Securities trader – $491,000
• Top 50 Rank: Systems Engineer