Depending on which agency you ask, the value of an American life is between $6 million – $9 million. Read the NY Times piece to get the scoop behind how they came up with that number, and why businesses are having a cow over the calculation.

Extremely important news for us non-millionaires. Basically this means that every breath we take is worth 6-9 million dollars.

Huh. Better get on with it and do something important.

So the Spirit of Ecstasy, or Flying Lady mascot seen on the bonnet of every Rolls Royce car turns 100 years old today. Time for some time travel to connect dots.

Before India got independence in 1947 more than 800 Rolls Royce cars were exported to India. Owned by the Maharajahs who splurged on this luxury vehicle, hunted tigers for fun all while their subjects lived in dire poverty. Not much has changed in 100 years. Today they are owned by the uber rich of India while…we don’t need to repeat how this sentence ends.

What a fascinating piece this is: a profile of Mohan Srivastava, a Toronto based MIT & Stanford educated geological statistician who figured out a flaw in the scratch-off lottery system that identified winning tickets. What’s surprising is how simple the plot is. And Srivastava’s aha! moment reads like quite the investigative thriller.

A must read at WIRED.COM

A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples.

Via Wired.com: Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, realized that the logic he used to find gold deposits could also crack lottery cards. Photo: John Midgley

Hattip: The Daily Dish

The ‘world’s cheapest car’ NANO got a reality check recently. Will dipping the whole dang thing in gold help sales? (read full post at IBTimes).

Seriously, can we just call out the profound stupidity of this debauched idea?

The Times Of India says the World Bank says India’s will grow faster than China’s in 2012.

The Economist thinks otherwise as in the graph below: