This Week I Learned - Week #264

This Week I Learned -

* Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL are generally available with a 99.99 percent uptime SLA.

* In 1988 there were 60,000 hosts on the internet, an intimate gathering compared to the approximately 4 billion hosts today.

* Of the over 7 billion people in the world, fewer than half are connected to the Internet.

* Vint Cerf admires "Alexander Graham Bell, partly because he was so fundamental to communication, and partly because his wife was deaf, and so is mine". Vint Cerf is hearing impaired—"I’ve worn a hearing aid since I was 13—and my wife (Sigrid Cerf) is deaf but uses two cochlear implants." - Google Blog

* Issac Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice in his entire life. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle; however, he did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston.

Bottlenose dolphins and Asian elephants possess the rare ability for mirror self-recognition previously thought to be restricted to humans and great apes.

* In Britain, asparagus is a god among vegetables.

Incurred claim ratio is the ratio of total claims paid out by the company divided by the premium collected by it in a year. This data is available in the Handbook of Indian Insurance Statistics (the 2016-2017 edition came out recently). If an insurer's incurred claim ratio is above, say, 90 per cent for retail, there is a high possibility that it may raise prices in the near future. Avoid such health insurance players.

* In 2016, ....Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together matched the entire US population while West Bengal and Odisha equalled Russia.

* According to Issac Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.

* "[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes." — Asimov, 1969

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