Monthly Archive for February, 2010

avoid all Hyatt hotels now!

Published on February 21, 2010 in anything. 598 Comments Tags: , , .

If you care about eth­i­cal values and stuffs, or you follow my blog, please heed my two pieces of advice:

  1. Avoid doing busi­ness with any Hyatt prop­erty forever
  2. Spread the words and tell all of your friends not to do busi­ness with Hyatt forever

Why?

In short, Hyatt laid off 100 house­keep­ers last year. Well, laying off employ­ees is actu­ally very normal though unfor­tu­nate. The thing is, Hyatt deceived the former employ­ees to train some new, out­sourced house­keep­ers before giving them the exe­cu­tion all of a sudden. It was not a typ­i­cal down­siz­ing, it was a replace­ment to out­sourced cheap labor and the com­pany fully exploited those grass-​root house­keep­ers. What a shame.

Read the full news article

Hyatt is a shame

And I regret so much to have eaten out at some Hyatt before. Well, no more.

Some more reading

Lessons From Hyatt: Simple Ways to Damage Your Brand – Our Edi­tors – Har­vard Busi­ness Review

House­keep­ers lose Hyatt jobs to out­sourc­ing – The Boston Globe

A brief on the brief history of time

Published on February 5, 2010 in learning. 536 Comments Tags: , , , .

A week ago, I attended a sem­i­nar in my school with the theme of Stephen Hawking’s A brief his­tory of time. Basi­cally, two pro­fes­sors shared their feel­ings and opin­ions towards this book. The talk was intended, like the book itself, to con­tain the least tech­ni­cal knowl­edge required but still be able to explain com­pli­cated, state of the art concepts.

A brief on the brief history of time

I was only a dozen pages in when I attended the talk, so attend­ing the talk actu­ally helped me grasp the big pic­ture of what this book is actu­ally about. Basi­cally, the book tries to dis­cuss cre­ation. How was the world created?

Here’s a list of stuffs it described:

  • Sin­gu­lar­ity – what is it and does it actu­ally exist?
  • Dark matter
  • Hawking’s radiation
  • Gen­eral Rel­a­tiv­ity and Quan­tum Mechanics
  • The stan­dard model to explain the unsolved ques­tions regard­ing the cre­ation of the uni­verse, when using Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­ity and Quan­tum Mechan­ics to explain it
  • Hawking’s own alter­na­tive hypoth­e­sis to the stan­dard model – No bound­ary proposal
  • In 1988, a researcher pub­lished a paper to illus­trate the pos­si­bil­ity of an imag­in­ery time machine. Basi­cally, what he said was that such a machine can fast-​forward time no prob­lem (using worm holes), but can only go back­wards in time after the machine has been invented. That explains why we haven’t seen time trav­el­ers from the future.
  • A lot of things about black holes

In pursuit of the beautiful creation

It’s prob­a­bly not con­veyed enough with words here, but I just failed to under­stand why any human on earth wouldn’t be fas­ci­nated by these beau­ti­ful topics. If there is one thing I’ll fall all over, become crazy and lose my mind about, this is prob­a­bly it. What’s so spe­cial about it? To quote Hawk­ing: if we manage to dis­cover the truth, the cause of our exis­tence, it would be the “ulti­mate tri­umph of human reason – to under­stand the mind of God.”