全美這幾天熱浪來襲，華府地區接連幾天氣溫都是上百度，可說是破記錄了。

除了讓兩個小孩到泳池泡水消暑，也準備了西瓜，綠豆湯解渴解熱。

我把同樣的東西變換花樣，如西瓜加牛奶打成西瓜牛奶汁，現成的綠豆湯加牛奶，冰塊，打成冰涼的綠豆冰沙，一如在台灣街上到處可見的夏日飲料。

兩個小孩都喜歡綠豆冰沙，為此，Lewis喝時，還特別問我冰沙是怎麼做的？我簡略說明做法，結果他接下來冒出的一句話，讓我笑岔口卻也相當窩心。他說這冰沙真好喝，我以後也要教我的小孩做綠豆冰沙!

??? 那不就是我的孫子嗎？OMG (我的天呀！) 想到那麼遠去了……….

因為覺得有趣，把它整理撰文以茲記念，將來回憶時可以提省我兒，他的童言童語。

營地@Elks Neck Park/Maryland

Family Cannoning

小朋友烤棉棉糖

有時在上班時打混，除了找同事哈拉聊天，我最喜歡看Blog/網誌，有幾個故定的班底，我會像農夫巡田一樣，每天跑一趟，看更新的文章。但大部份的時間，看心情，大多隨便找主題看，不過幾乎還是跟吃有關，從這裡不難看出愛吃的本性。

今天看遊記,看到這個起司派，做法簡單，家裡材料都有，下班後，家事雜事都忙完後，烤了一個起司派。墊底的水果用的是桃子，上面淋上自製的籃莓醬。Yum….很好吃喔!

原食譜出處底加

全家早起到住家附近的SenecaCreekState Park釣魚. 

我有N年沒拿釣竿，不過我一直都對釣魚保有相當的興趣。

小時後，我家旁邊有個池塘，我和弟弟，友伴，就在池塘旁老爸的菜園香焦樹下挖丘蚓, 釣魚跟玩樂。

Emily caught her fish!

Where is the fish?

魚在那裡?

稍晚太陽光強了,魚兒都躲到有樹蔭的地方,不再上鉤,我們也決定收拾釣竿，進入樹林沿著湖邊散步去。兩個小朋友精力旺盛，跑跑跳跳的，一下子就不見煙影，把拔也驅步跟上去,就只剩下我老媽子一個人在後頭苦苦追趕。也因此讓我有機會從後頭拍下這珍貴的鏡頭。平日只見兩個小孩吵架打鬧，今兒看到姐弟兩手牽手，有說有笑，心裡眼角頓時一陣熱，希望他倆永遠能像這樣相互扶持。

繞湖一圈花上一個半小時，我和兩個小孩又累又餓，把拔提意去吃 Brunch（早午餐），我們就靠這個鼓勵走完全程。 Hurray!

Apple Bobbing

Tub of water Apple red

Time has come to duck your head

Open up

Take a bite

Grab an Apple hold on tight!

By Emily Li @ 2010

President Obama’s bracket is only 10 points behind…impressive how well he picked! but we pretty much picked the same winners…so the 10 point differential cannot be made up….

Early writing by Lewis….

I love you deep in my heart and it will last forever.

so say yes and I’ll take you to heaven….

so say yes and I’ll take you to heaven

By Emily @ 8

                                                              i.      Synopsis: An economist poses questions on the real world and uses data to explain why it happened. For example:

1. Why do teacher’s cheat?
2. What happens when a late fee is charged?
3. Why do drug dealers live at home?
4. Does real-estate agent has your interest in mind?
5. Why did the crime rate drop?
6. Is it more dangerous to leave your child at a house with swimming pool or gun?

                                                            ii.      The book is useful for understanding the world and for policy making.

                                                          iii.      The world is driven by moral, economic, and social incentives.

1.  
   1. Stock, Bond, Futures, Options – Scott Veale

                                                              i.      This is a great book on different types of securities and how the investment domain operates.

                                                            ii.      Stocks

1. Private placement

                                                          iii.      Bond

                                                          iv.      Futures (forwards)

                                                            v.      Options

1.  
   1. Everything you’ve heard about Investing is Wrong, William H. Gross

                                                              i.      A proponent of bond investing for the next decade (the book was published in the late 1990s). The author describes the market as Butler’s Creek a gentle stream. He expects the market to return 6 to 8%. Therefore, bonds should be a large part of one’s portfolio because of it’s inherently reduced risk.

                                                            ii.      Brady Bonds – those foreign bonds that are backed by US treasury.

                                                          iii.      Close End funds – to invest in foreign stock buy close end funds. Listed in Barron. Usually sells below asset value. (book value)

                                                          iv.      Plankton Theory – watch the demographics in estimating the economy. In general, people start spending more in the 20s and increasingly to the 40s. So when a large number of people are in this population the economic activity increases. The 1970s was a period of birth bust.

                                                            v.      Reduce the fees.

                                                          vi.      Focus on the secular trends and make your bet for 3-5 year window. Read the Economist for secular trends.

                                                        vii.      Uses the gambling technique

1. If you have an edge over the long term, keep playing even if you are losing.
2. to beat the house, bet more when you know the odds are in your favor.
3. Don’t risk everything. The gambler’s ruin.

1.  
   1. Carolyn 101, Carolyn Kepcher

                                                              i.      A book on succeeding in the corporate world

                                                            ii.      As an employee, make sure you have a chance to succeed.

                                                          iii.      It discusses good employee

1. Make sure you have access to all the answers.
2. You don’t need to know the answer. Just whom to ask.
3. Your manager has tight timeline. Bring only necessary and summarize information.

                                                          iv.      Good manager

1. Managers have a mixture of these three traits
   1. Traditional – based on title demands action.
   2. Rational – explain action to people.
   3. Charismatic – inspires or lead by example.

                                                            v.      Life

1. Balance your life. Do not mix work and life.

1.  
   1. Simply Speaking, Peggy Noonan

                                                              i.      Book on speech writing and presentation by the speech writer for Reagan

                                                            ii.      She did not give a speech until 40.

                                                          iii.      Her advice is to:

1. Keep it logical
2. Be your self.
3. Be concise and clear
4. Keep the content, change the audience(use the same content more than once)

                                                          iv.      She also gave advice on more than one type of speech such as toast, eulogy..

1.  
   1. Collapse, Jared Diamond

                                                              i.      An explanation of why societies fails

1. They do not realize because of slow volatile changes such as climate changes.
2. They do not realize because of large areas.
3. They realize, but choose to continue because of they seek status.
4. They realize, but fail.
5. Rational decisions maybe results in bad decisions such as over fishing (if I don’t catch a fish, someone else will.) Or outsized rewards with big cost spread amongst many people (i.e. such as mining which results in large rewards but costs billions to clean up. But no single person is affected to complain).

1.  
   1. Guns, Germs and Steel

Laying A Foundation For Human History by Bill Gates.

When Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro and other European colonists arrived in the New World five centuries ago, why weren’t they driven into the sea by thousands of native warriors on horseback brandishing guns and carrying epidemic diseases?

Why didn’t rhino-mounted Bantu warriors swarm north to decimate horse-mounted Romans and create an empire that spanned Africa and Europe?

These and many other questions are answered persuasively in Jared Diamond’s fascinating new book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W.W. Norton, 1997). It’s the first explanation of history I’ve seen that gets at the key question of why Europeans and Asians, came to control most of the world, rather than Africans, Native Americans or other people.

Diamond’s primary thesis is that there’s no inherent superiority among any racial or ethnic groups, and that the often-tragic failure of other races to resist expansion by other peoples was largely a matter of bad luck.

He marshals mountains of evidence to suggest that Europeans and Asians achieved dominance because they had an abundance of plants and animals suitable for domestication, and because the east-west orientation of the Eurasian landmass eased the transfer of animals, crops, and technology.

Eurasia had 32 of the 56 prize wild grasses that were candidates for cultivation; no other region had more than six. It was home to 13 of the 14 animals most important to humans.

The Fertile Crescent, an area of Southwest Asia occupying portions of what are now Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, had six of the eight “founder crops” and four of the five most important domesticated mammals—the cow, goat, pig and sheep.

It’s no surprise that the Fertile Crescent produced prodigious amounts of food and that the earliest known examples of many kinds of human development began there about 11,000 B.C. People outside Eurasia, and especially outside the Fertile Crescent, were at a big disadvantage because there wasn’t much for them to work with. Few of the world’s 200,000 wild plant species have food value to humans. More than 80 percent of the modern world’s crop tonnage comes from just 12 species: banana, barley, corn, manioc, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet , sugarcane, sweet potato and wheat.

“Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating,” Diamond writes.

Domesticated animals furnished fertilizer, meat and milk. They pulled plows. They helped win wars. Whereas the Fertile Crescent had many, California had no important mammals to domesticate, despite sharing a similar climate.

In fact, North America had no large mammals suitable for domestication other than the llama, and it wasn’t widespread. When human hunters arrived in the Americas via the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, they apparently killed most of the unwary mammals that would have been suited to domestication.

“About 15,000 years ago, the American West looked much as Africa’s Serengeti Plains do today, with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant sloths,” Diamond writes. Soon these species were extinct.

In Europe and Asia, food surpluses allowed some people to specialize in science or art and others to focus their energies on being soldiers. Civilizations grew in the Fertile Crescent and spread to the east and west.

One reason a native cavalry didn’t drive Columbus and other European colonialists back into the Atlantic was that there were no native horsemen. The Americas didn’t have horses again until Europeans brought them, and the natives didn’t get them until they escaped from Spanish explorers.

Rhino-mounted warriors didn’t swarm into Europe from Africa because rhinos can’t be domesticated. Nor can elephants, hippos, zebras or any of the other African animals that would otherwise make great allies in war. These animals can sometimes be tamed into submission, but their breeding—and hence their genetic characteristics—can’t be controlled the way horses can.

Diamond illustrates the enormous competitive advantage enjoyed by societies with horses and guns by recounting how Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro used 62 horsemen and 106 foot soldiers to destroy thousands of Inca soldiers on Nov. 16, 1532. In a matter of hours, Pizarro’s small band captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, leader of America’s most advanced state, by panicking the emperor’s 80,000 guards.

Disease was even more important than horses or guns in the European subjugation of the Americas and the rest of the world. Diamond estimates that European disease wiped out 95 percent of America’s pre-Columbian population. Epidemics spread from tribe to tribe, often well in advance of the Europeans themselves.

Why, instead, didn’t Indian epidemic diseases wipe out Europeans?

Epidemic diseases originated in domesticated animals. Measles, smallpox and tuberculosis came to humans from cattle, flu came from pigs and ducks, and pertussis (whooping cough) came from pigs and dogs.

Indians didn’t have epidemic diseases or immunities because they didn’t have the domesticated animals that gave rise to the diseases.

Besides having good grains, good animals and diseases on their side, Eurasians were blessed with a huge landmass that was oriented east-west rather than north-south like Africa and America.

People could take their crops and livestock long distances to the east or west, because climate tended not to change much along a given latitude. Trade routes eventually opened from Asia to Europe.

North-south migration tended to be vastly more difficult. Abrupt climate changes would render a crop useless, and mean the wrong forage and weather for livestock. African and American civilizations were isolated by mountains, deserts or rainforests and often unable to share in the advances of other cultures that might be as little as 1,000 miles to the north or south.

Natives of Australia, New Guinea and much of the rest of the Pacific suffered because of their isolation, too. Diamond makes a compelling case that traditional lifestyles in New Guinea and Australia, rather than showing a lack of “advancement,” as defined by Europeans, were in fact intelligent adaptations to areas with difficult soils and climates and a lack of domesticable animals. A thousand years ago Asia was equal or ahead of Europe in many technologies.

Diamond argues that Europeans later pulled ahead of Asians because Japan and China became inward-looking and stopped trading ideas with other countries. The result, almost by default, was European domination of much of the world until after World War II.

Japan and now China have roared back as economic powers, and for Japan technological innovation has been a key to its enormous strides in recent decades. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” lays a foundation for understanding human history, which makes it fascinating in its own right. Because it brilliantly describes how chance advantages can lead to early success in a highly competitive environment, it also offers useful lessons for the business world and for people interested in why technologies succeed.

The book reminds me that innovation sustains success while complacency leads to stagnation and decline—a lesson I try to keep in mind every day.

In early human history, technological advantages were built on the availability of certain plants, animals and geographies.

In today’s emerging information society, the critical natural resources are human intelligence, skill and leadership. Every region of the world has these in abundance, which promises to make the next chapter of human history particularly interesting.

1. It’s not what you say…it’s what you do. Laurence Haughton.

                                                              i.      This book is about how to motivate people.

                                                            ii.      It’s not about the compensation. It’s to understand people, their problem. It’s to make them understand.

1.  
   1. Accidental Investment Banker Jonanthan Knee

                                                              i.      Insight into life of an investment banker

                                                            ii.      The author started as an interns at an investement bank where he learned his distaste for the business even though a partner in the bank says he has the qualifications. After a stint at United Airline where he had to leave after a management change due to bankruptcy, he ended up in London branch of Goldman Sach where he learned from Thornton who eventually became a top lieutenant in Goldman before his ultimate ouster. He then went on to Morgan Stanley. He showed the world of investment banking consist of a culture of contingency where making a deal is more important than the outcome. Any concern is addressed by “IBG, YBG” I be gone , you be gone”