Year: 2018

Language Tool – My Russian Name

My Russian Name is a tool for converting a name into Russian (Cyrillic) spelling. To make the transliterations as accurate as possible, it is not sufficient to convert on a per-character basis. To improve the quality, I made a crawler that collected transliterations for a few thousand names on Russian Wikipedia. With more time, and a larger sample of names, it should be possible to make this tool nearly perfect.

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World precious metal mining trends 1994-2017

I went through all annual U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries for gold, silver, platinum and palladium for the last 23 years. From these reports I collected the annual world mine production for each year, and I also noted the top three producers of each metal for 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017. The intention was to get an overview of year-on-year variability in mine output, the long term output trends […]

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How old were the PayPal Mafia members?

PayPal was founded in 1998 and sold to Ebay in 2002. Several of the key members have since become billionaires, founded companies such as Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp and/or seed invested in Facebook. I copied the list of PayPal members, coined the PayPal Mafia, from Wikipedia and added their ages in year 2000: Billionaires Peter Thiel (born 1967; 33 years old), PayPal founder and former chief executive officer who is sometimes referred to […]

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Palm oil – some notes

Supply (production) Index Mundi’s list of palm oil producers shows that Indonesia produces 40.5 million tons (55% of world annual total) Malaysia produces 21.0 million tons (28% of world total) Thailand produces 4.0 million tons (4% of world total) World total is about 72.5 million tons The annual yield varies only moderately due to weather conditions. Land use  Indonesia; 11.7 million ha (of 190 million ha; 6%) Malaysia; 4.5 million ha […]

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Is taking the CFA worth it?

Should I aim to become a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA)? Let’s compare the costs and benefits. Costs Fees One-time enrollment fee; USD 450 Exam registration fee (covers complete curriculum eBook, practice tests and mock exams); USD 650 – 1380 depending on how early you register For all three levels (exams I, II and III), the fees add up to USD 1950 – 4140 Exam retake requires a new fee; there […]

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