Rigel Kent

A friend of mine sent me an email this afternoon. It is a news clip titled: Genting founder dies. And so, Tan Sri Lim Goh Tong (林梧桐) is now dead. He passed away this morning at Subang Jaya Medical Center. It is not easy to build a business like Genting, because you need a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. There is no doubt that Lim fulfilled the first criterion. To understand how dedicated Lim was, you can read his autobiography or you can go to Genting's website . The second criterion, the luck element, is rarely mentioned. And it is my intention to highlight a little bit in this article. At the time when Lim was 32, he was introduced to a Muarian named Mohammad Noah Omar (1898  –  1991). And the friendship and business partnership between Lim and Noah turned out to be very fruitful and beneficial to both parties. In 1948, the second daughter of Noah, Suhaila, was married to Hussein Onn. Four years later, Noah's youngest daughter, Rahah, was married to Abdul Razak. So, Lim

In 2003, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov came to Malaysia to do promotion on his fighter jets. Ivanov is a very good business man because he knew his customer very well. And in May 19, 2003, Najib Razak announced that we have agreed to purchase 18 Indian-made Sukhoi-30MKM fighter jets from Russia. Later, it was announced that the price of the 18 jets is $900 millions and there is also an offset agreement in which Russia will offer Malaysia one seat in the Russian spacecraft. Did Ivanov and Najib discussed in detail about the offset agreement in 2003? We are not very sure. But I guess Ivanov must have hinted Najib on the possibility of realizing Malaysian dreams of creating his own Angkasawan, free of charge. Initially, we were told by the Russians that our boy will be trained in Star City, Moscow in 2004 and be sent to space by 2005. But the American businessman, Gregory Hammond Olsen paid $20 millions and he got the place in the Soyuz TMA-7 mission, launched in October 1, 2005.

I need to take two types of math papers when I was in Form Four. The year was 1996 and it was the year when we celebrated the completion of the Petronas Twin Towers. The first paper is called modern math , the second paper is called additional math . Although the first paper is prefixed with the word modern , some of its contents is not modern at all. One example is that the government forced us to learn an outdated technique of multiplying numbers with the aid of four-figure tables. A booklet of four-figure mathematical tables, arranged and compiled by two English mathematicians Jeffrey C. P. Miller (1906 – 1981) and Frank C. Powell (1905 – 1993). I can still recall that I watched bemusedly, as my modern math teacher, Mr. Chan Wai Cheng, demonstrated to us, the lengthy and laborious procedure for obtaining product like $$7314 \times 7986$$ in the classroom. The procedure requires the student to first read the logarithms for the two numbers from the l