Equilibrium is...dis-Equilibrium

PayPal will stop electronic withdrawal of funds for Indian users

PayPal seems to be having a tough time in the World's second largest (No.1 is Ireland) software outsourcing destination. In accordance with regulatory instructions from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), starting from July 29, 2010 onwards, Electronic withdrawal of funds from Payal accounts will be stopped. The only way left is to request for a cheque withdrawal of funds from the PayPal account. In order to help its India users deal with this change and until further notice, PayPal will refund the US$5 cheque withdrawal fee to the users for cheque withdrawals made on July 29, 2010 onwards.

There is significant uproar over this issue as checks are cumbersome to manage and typically take close to a month to get cleared at Indian Banks. This incident is the second time this year that Paypal has had hiccups with its Indian operations. Earlier this year, PayPal stopped allowing Personal Payments to be sent to and from India citing differences with the RBI.

 

What's your most memorable "that's my family" moment?

For me, it's that moment when Anshuman born. For I can still recall those few minutes, before he came to our life, as hard, lonely and confusing. He came, he didn't cry (I remembered and isn't it surprising), he didn't make much noise yet wiped away all blues from life!

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Steve Jobs on iPhone 4: "No Reception Issues, Stay Tuned"

"Not to confuse 'Inception' with the new iPhone hit 'No Reception'." 

- David Letterman via Twitter

The iPhone 4's two antennas are built into the steel band on the exterior of the device. The one running on the left side of the iphone is for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, while the one on the right-hand side is for cellular reception. For left-handers, that means they'll likely grip the phone differently than right-handed people. But in an e-mail to a customer, CEO Steve Jobs seems to have a slightly different take on the affair.

"There is no reception issue. Stay tuned," he wrote in a response to a user who wrote Jobs directly.

Jobs' one-liner appears to contradict his earlier advice where he advised a user to "just avoid holding [his phone a particular] way." Apple did not reply for comment by the time this post went up.

via cbsnews.com

How Twitter actually makes you a better writer

"The whole concept of Twitter reminds me of a challenge that Hemingway once accepted. He was told to write an entire novel in six words. Imagine trying to cram an entire novel's worth of emotion, imagination and plot into six short words. The resulting story was, "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." Hemingway himself said he believed it to be his best prose ever. It's amazing how so few words can tell such a big story. The same goes for Twitter."

- Elyse Gibson

Now, if you ask me what Twitter is? I'll tell you the Chekhov quote ("It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.") Yeah. Twitter has attend such a level!

Recently telling metaphors for Facebook

"On the one hand, the social-networking service signed up its 500 millionth active user. On the other hand, it was found to be one of the least popular private-sector companies in the United States by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. [...] Analysts always grasp for analogies to explain Facebook's tortured relationship with its users. Facebook has been called the sterile suburbs to the gritty urban Internet; it is a "walled garden" in the organic messiness of the Web; it is Russia under Vladimir Putin; it is (and this one stings in tech circles) today's AOL."

- Joshua Brustein via nytimes.com

Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues that Facebook fits that mold. On her blog in May, she posted:

"I hate all of the utilities of my life. Venomous hatred. And because they're monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I'm not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

And, in the comment section you can find one justified reaction from Jacob Kramer-Duffield:

"Facebook's approach to the market is much more of a would-be monopolist than a would-be utility."

How difficult it is to accept that behind the facade of our lengthy, narrative rages lies the aimless human circus. 

 

"My boyfriend showed me a paragraph out of Jack Kerouac's book On the Road, about people that are buzzing and fizzing and full of life and never say a commonplace thing. They shoot across the sky like a firework and make people go, 'Ahhh'. I guess that making people go 'ahhh' is kind of like my motto."

- Katy Perry

Differences between the male and female brain...

"A man's brain has a more difficult time shifting from thinking to feeling than a women's brain does."

- Barbara De Angelis

There really are big differences between the male and female brain, says Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University. In his new book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (published by Penguin) Baron-Cohen shows that, indisputably, on average male and female minds are of a slightly different character. Men tend to be better at analyzing systems (better systemizes), while women tend to be better at reading the emotions of other people (better empathizers). Baron-Cohen shows that this distinction arises from biology, not culture.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen FBA (born 15 August 1958) is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the Director of the University's Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is best known for his work on autism, including his early theory that autism involves degrees of "mindblindness" (or delays in the development of theory of mind); and his later theory that autism is an extreme form of the "male brain", which involved a reconceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathizing–systemizing theory.

Which NBA player had the most surprising year?

Rajon Rondo, in my view.

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