Was picked up by a Ritz-Carlton Millennia representative at the Marriott Tang Plaza, and left in the rain. Checked into the Ritz-Carlton and, as our room was not yet ready, we were sent to the Club Lounge. Team time came. The Marina Bay Sands fourth tower coming up. Started with champagne, Tea time. Checked into our room. Our view. National Stadium. Back to the Club Lounge for drinks and appetizers. My evening meal. Night view. An all-time low of 1038 steps. A week old, but U.S.  president's cold opening Christmas Address on Saturday Night Live .  Finally,  Eduardo Saverin  is the  wealthiest person in Singapore .  Worth $43 billion. You probably never heard of him, but he was a junior at Harvard, when he and sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, with three others, founded Facebook in 2004. Was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1982, and his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1993. Emigrated to Singapore in 2009 and renounced his American citizenship in 2011, sidestep...

What are the largest companies in the world?   Nine of the top ten are from the USA.  We have long been the greatest. Note that #5 shows Google in parentheses next to Alphabet, and #7 has Facebook as part of Meta.  What happened? Google, as you know reinvented the way the world accesses information.   Why restructure? Without much warning in 2015, Google renamed itself Alphabet. This allowed the parent, Alphabet, to expand into domains outside of internet search and advertising. Google now runs a lesser risk of antitrust violations. You might get confused by GOOG and GOOGL, stock ticker symbols of Alphabet.  I won't try to explain it, but  you can click here for details . 52-year old  Sundar Pichai ( originally, Pichai Sundararajan ) is the CEO of Alphabet,  while founders Larry Page ( 52 ) and Sergey Brin ( 53 ) no longer are involved in daily operations.  Sundar's compensation last year was $10.72 million. Note that Alphabet is the 5th...

In August  Time  magazine had an issue on the Metaverse.  As they will not allow you to read the article, I'll try to crystalize the essence as simply as possible, supplementing as necessary. What is the multiverse? A hypothetical iteration of the internet as a single, universal and immersive virtual world facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality. Or a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connections. Every few decades, there is a platform shift :   I started teaching computer courses when there were mainframes.  That was in 1972, half a century ago. Then came PCs and the internet. Now mobile and cloud computing. The internet today is worldwide with 40,000 networks, millions of applications, over 100 million servers, almost a billion websites and tens of billions devices. While everything is theoretically interconnected, just think, whoever controls the system, runs the world. That is one way of describing the metaverse, explaining ...