Strange.

Stairway to Heaven Sung Backwards and then Played Backwards

Purpose: While an individual's risk preferences are assumed to influence decisions that involve uncertainty, risk perceptions may also play a role. Belief in personal luck is one factor that may influence how individuals perceive risk. In this preliminary work, we examine the relationship between belief in luck and two kinds of decisions involving uncertainty, in a sample of cardiovascular patients.

This was a lucky find.

THE INFLUENCE OF BELIEF IN LUCK ON CHOICES INVOLVING UNCERTAINTY

The psychology of luck

This project explores why some people live charmed lives, and develops techniques that enable others to enhance their good fortune. The project began in 1994 and has involved hundreds of exceptionally lucky and unlucky people. These findings have been published in Prof Wiseman's bestselling book The Luck Factor. Current work examines how these ideas can be applied in organisational and business settings.

Richard Wiseman - luck

Fu is a lucky word. It is very easy to say it.

Fu - Chinese word for 'luck'

It gets even more interesting: the man who has been identified as the CEO of Shirlington has a 62-page rap sheet (I recently obtained a copy) that runs from at least 1979 through 1989 and lists charges of petit larceny, robbery, receiving stolen goods, assault, and more. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously given the company's connections—Shirlington Limousine is also a Department of Homeland Security contractor; according to the Washington Post, last fall it won a $21.2 million contract for shuttle services and transportation support. (I tried to contact Shirlington but was unable to get past their answering service.)

Red Lights on Capitol Hill? (Harpers.org)

One of the earliest published writer on luck was the 16th century Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli wrote extensively on the cause of good fortune. In his short book, The Prince (written in 1514, but published posthumously in 1532), an essay of advice to his patron, Lorenzo de Medici, Machiavelli explains that fortune favors the bold thus advising his Prince, not without controversy, to always act decisively:

Fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her.

I've been thinking about luck alot lately, as I observe people attribute luck to the variance of purely deterministic systems.

The Great Seduction: A SHORT HISTORY OF LUCK

So me and that guy in the background, shared the tiny space between cars on a train from Old Delhi to Pathankot in the Punjab. In this pic: http://lucision.com/legal/rjurney/India%20Pics/IMG_0567.jpg you can see the plates that join the two cars together. I snuggled over next to dude's legs and wedged a book, 'The Life of Pi' between my hip and that bouncing plate so it wouldn't pinch me and rip off my sweet little love handle. It was 12 or so hours of the most fucked up un-sleep I've ever, ever had. I'd do it again too.

Me and the Man I Slept with Between Rail Cars.JPG

This is a picture of me getting fluids in a Tibetan hospital in Dharamsala, shortly after I shit my pants in the Tibetan hospital, in Dharamsala. Some of you have heard the story. Now you have a picture too. Woo hoo!

Shit My Pants in a Tibetan Hospital.JPG

If you follow web services, then you may have heard of REST. REST is an architectural style that can be used to guide the construction of web services. Recently, there have been attempts to create such services that have met with mixed success. This article outlines a series of steps you can follow in creating your protocol--guidance that will help you get all the benefits that REST has to offer, while avoiding common pitfalls.

How to create a REST Protocol | 2006-03-24 | BitWorking

REST Web Services Characteristics
Here are the characteristics of REST:

* Client-Server: a pull-based interaction style: consuming components pull representations.
* Stateless: each request from client to server must contain all the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.
* Cache: to improve network efficiency responses must be capable of being labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable.
* Uniform interface: all resources are accessed with a generic interface (e.g., HTTP GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
* Named resources - the system is comprised of resources which are named using a URL.
* Interconnected resource representations - the representations of the resources are interconnected using URLs, thereby enabling a client to progress from one state to another.
* Layered components - intermediaries, such as proxy servers, cache servers, gateways, etc, can be inserted between clients and resources to support performance, security, etc.

REST