Interview with Iran's President Ahmadinejad

This Spiegel Interview with Iran's President Ahmadinejad is...fascinating:

Ahmadinejad: Let me ask you one thing: How much longer can this go on? How much longer do you think the German people have to accept being taken hostage by the Zionists? When will that end — in 20, 50, 1,000 years?

SPIEGEL: We can only speak for ourselves. DER SPIEGEL is nobody's hostage; SPIEGEL does not deal only with Germany's past and the Germans' crimes. We're not Israel's uncritical ally in the Palestian conflict. But we want to make one thing very clear: We are critical, we are independent, but we won't simply stand by without protest when the existential right of the state of Israel, where many Holocaust survivors live, is being questioned.

Ahmadinejad: Precisely that is our point. Why should you feel obliged to the Zionists? If there really had been a Holocaust, Israel ought to be located in Europe, not in Palestine.

SPIEGEL: Do you want to resettle a whole people 60 years after the end of the war?

Ahmadinejad: Five million Palestinians have not had a home for 60 years. It is amazing really: You have been paying reparations for the Holocaust for 60 years and will have to keep paying up for another 100 years. Why then is the fate of the Palestinians no issue here?

SPIEGEL: The Europeans support the Palestinians in many ways. After all, we also have an historic responsibility to help bring peace to this region finally. But don't you share that responsibility?

Ahmadinejad: Yes, but aggression, occupation and a repetition of the Holocaust won't bring peace. What we want is a sustainable peace. This means that we have to tackle the root of the problem. I am pleased to note that you are honest people and admit that you are obliged to support the Zionists.

SPIEGEL: That's not what we said, Mr. President.

Ahmadinejad: You said Israelis.

A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers

Jim McGee presents A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers under a number of topics, like Learning, Mindfulness, and Reflection:

Mindfulness
Langer, Ellen J.

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
Schon, Donald A.

Teaching As a Subversive Activity
Postman, Neil

Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water
Vaill, Peter B.

Filters Against Folly : How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent
Hardin, Garrett

Improv Wisdom : Don't Prepare, Just Show Up
Madson, Patricia Ryan

How to Read a Book
Adler, Mortimer Jerome

Infinite Story

Infinite Story presents itself as the "Never-Ending Story Engine" — but it used to go by another, more recognizable, name:

Due to a Cease & Desist from the owner of the Choose Your Own Adventure patents, this site was forced to change its url from www.Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.com to www.infinite-story.com. Please do not confuse our Infinite Stories with the Choose Your Own Adventure printed books as our media are not affiliated.

Mongolian Sumo Wrestlers

Years ago, Hawaiian sumo wrestlers took the sport by storm. Now Mongolian Sumo Wrestlers, coming from a country with a strong wrestling tradition, are doing the same:

Mongolian-born champion Hakuho, right, hoists compatriot Kyokushuzan high during their bout at Tokyo's Ryogoku Kokugikan sumo arena on Monday May 18, 2006. Hakuho notched a win on Day 12 of the 15-day meet and remained tied for the lead with Miyabiyama.

I blogged on another Mongolian sumo wrestler, Asashoryu, and his hair-grabbing scandal a few years ago.

Baby with 3 arms may have surgery

Baby with 3 arms may have surgery:

Doctors in Shanghai are considering surgery options for a two-month old boy born with an unusually well-formed third arm.

Neither of the boy's two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children's Medical Center.

What Ph.D. students really have to fear

Joel Waldfogel explains that What Ph.D. students really have to fear is a weak job market at the precise time they enter it:

If the quality of initial placements persistently affects career success, then the academics who start in boom years should remain in better positions five or 10 years out—even though the bust-year graduates were equally talented and qualified when they left the starting gate. And sure enough, five years into their respective careers, members of the boom cohorts are more likely to hold good jobs at Top 50 institutions than similar candidates entering the job market in bust years. In general, about a quarter of elite Ph.D.s end up at first-tier institutions. Starting one's career in a boom year raises the probability of ending up at a Top 50 department by between 40 and 60 percent.

Boom-year graduates don't end up in better jobs arbitrarily. Along the way they publish more articles that are more influential. Despite their elite credentials when hired, more than a third of the econ Ph.D.s in Oyer's study had not published anything 10 years after graduation. The other two-thirds had published an average of 6.2 articles. Starting at a Top 50 institution raised that total by roughly a factor of two.

What about the effect on publication in the best-regarded journals—the only way to earn real street cred in the field? Most economists never crack these outlets in their entire careers. But an initial job in a Top 50 institution has an enormous impact, raising the probability of publishing in one of the top five journals by a whopping 50 percent. So, quality of the first job really matters.

To the list of graduate-student anxieties, then, we can add this: In the year I look for a job, will the Fed ease interest rates to keep the economy growing and the academic job market humming? Because if fate nudges you into the academic dungeon, you'll probably stay there.

Project Babylon: Gerald Bull's Downfall

If you haven't read about Project Babylon: Gerald Bull's Downfall, it's quite fascinating:

His success on the G5 won the attention of both Iraq and China. He built and sold advanced artillery to both nations through an Austrian outfit throughout the 1980s. Having developed something of a personal rapport with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Bull finally saw an opportunity to realize his ultimate goal. He convinced Hussein that, like Israel, Iraq needed the ability to launch satellites into orbit if it were ever to become a true regional power.

Work began on Project Babylon with a prototype of the supergun in the mid-1980s. This gun, named Baby Babylon, had a bore diameter of about 1 foot, and was approximately 100 feet long. It was mounted horizontally for test purposes, and was believed to have been constructed solely to develop the technology needed for Big Babylon. Nevertheless, Baby Babylon would have had a range of over 400 miles if properly mounted.

Two of the sections of the Big Babylon gun at Fort NelsonThe appropriately named Big Babylon was so large that it had to be dug into a hillside for support. Its bore was 3 feet in diameter, and was over 500 feet long. Once completed it would have been capable of launching over 2 tons into orbit–about the size of a small reconnaissance satellite.

Marriage And Great Science Don't Mix

Marriage And Great Science Don't Mix:

Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists — mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists. When he calculated the age of each scientist at the peak of his career — the sample was predominantly male — Kanazawa noted an interesting trend. After a crest during the third decade of life, scientific productivity — as evidenced by major discoveries and publications — fell off dramatically with age. When he looked at the marital history of the sample, he found that the decline in productivity was less severe among men who had never been married. As a group, unmarried scientists continued to achieve well into their late 50s, and their rates of decline were slower.

Any Officer Who Goes Into Action Without His Sword is Improperly Dressed

"Mad" Jack Churchill once said, "Any Officer Who Goes Into Action Without His Sword is Improperly Dressed":

During the BEF’s fighting retreat, Churchill remained aggressive, unwilling to give up a yard of ground while extracting the maximum cost from the enemy. He was especially fond of raids and counterattacks, leading small groups of picked soldiers against the advancing Germans. He presented a strange, almost medieval figure at the head of his men, carrying not only his war bow and arrows, but his sword as well.

As befitted his love of things Scottish, Churchill carried the basket-hilted claymore (technically a claybeg, the true claymore being an enormous two-handed sword). Later on, asked by a general who awarded him a decoration why he carried a sword in action, Churchill is said to have answered: “In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”

Read the whole article.

Mincemeat and the Imaginary Man

In May, 1943, a Spanish fisherman retrieved the waterlogged corpse of a British military officer carrying a locked briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

Naturally the body — and the briefcase — ended up in Nazi hands — just as planned. From Mincemeat and the Imaginary Man:

Montagu's team quietly procured the body of a 34-year-old man who had recently died with pneumonia, whose lungs already contained fluid as a drowned man's would. The family of the deceased granted permission to use the body for this mission on the condition that the man's identity never be revealed. As the body waited in cold storage, the fictional life of Major William Martin was fabricated in great detail by the Twenty Committee (often referred to by the roman numeral XX or 'double-cross'). The corpse was given identification, keys, personal letters, and other possessions. In order to explain why the man would be found chained to his briefcase, Montagu's team planted evidence suggesting that Major Martin was an absent-minded but responsible chap, including overdue bills and a replacement ID card. Such a man might chain himself to a briefcase full of sensitive documents in order to prevent its loss during the flight.

On 28 April 1943, Major Martin was placed aboard the submarine HMS Seraph in a special steel canister packed with dry ice. The crew set off for the coast of Spain, where it was likely that a citizen of the Axis-aligned country would locate the body and report it to authorities. After two days at sea, the submarine surfaced about a mile off the coast of Spain at 4:30 in the morning. Believing that the heavy canister contained top secret meteorological equipment, members of the crew carried it on deck, after which point everyone aside from the officers was ordered below deck. There in the dark, Lt. Norman L.A. (Bill) Jewell, the commander of Seraph, explained the mission and swore the men to secrecy. Major Martin's body was then removed from the canister onto the deck, where he was fitted with his life jacket and chained to his briefcase. The men read the 39th Psalm and committed the body to the sea, where the tide gradually drew it ashore.

Once the body was discovered, Britain's requests for the return of the briefcase helped complete the illusion that there was sensitive information contained therein. To further the hoax, Montagu arranged to have Major Martin's name included on the next British casualty list in The Times. When the documents were finally returned to the British two weeks later, microscopic examination revealed that the Germans had indeed opened and resealed the letters. Additionally, German transmissions decrypted by Ultra indicated that the Nazis were moving forces to defend Sardinia, Corsica, and Greece. This news prompted a brief cable to Winston Churchill to inform him of the success: 'Mincemeat Swallowed Whole.'

Snakes on a M-----f---ing Plane

In case you saw the trailer for Snakes on a Plane this weekend and heard the crowd roar with laughter and didn't know why, I present the original Snakes on a M-----f---ing Plane blog posting that set off an chain reaction across the blogosphere.

I'm the Juggernaut, Bitch!

Like most people in the X-Men 3 audience, I got a chuckle out of Juggernaut's line, "I'm the Juggernaut, Bitch!" What I didn't realize at the time was that the line was a bit of an inside joke — someone had pimp-dubbed the old X-Men cartoon and put it online.

UFC 60: Royce Gracie vs Matt Hughes

If you're a fan of the sport, you must watch UFC 60: Royce Gracie vs Matt Hughes. (And God bless YouTube.)

Edit: Regrettably, YouTube had to take down the video. Fortunately, there's still another copy up — for now.

Baghdad, USA

Baghdad, USA describes the elaborate simulations put on for American soldiers:

The Cubic guys work hard for a good fake. They’ve staged bloody aftermaths of bomb attacks, applying gory makeup to Vietnam veterans with missing limbs to make extra-convincing bomb victims. Teams of “firemarkers” zip around the Box on all-terrain vehicles, rigging up Hollywood-style pyrotechnics for roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. “We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,” he says.

Epicenter of AIDS Is Found: Africa, 1930

NPR's All Things Considered says the Epicenter of AIDS Is Found: Africa, 1930:

Scientists say they have pinpointed the origin of the AIDS virus. It all started in southern Cameroon in West Central Africa around 1930, according to a study published online by the journal Science. The virus that started the global pandemic — recognized 25 years ago next week — passed from chimps to humans in that area.

The reservoir of the ancestral virus still exists among chimpanzee communities in the same area of Cameroon.

Now that scientists have uncovered HIV's origin, they're hoping to find clues to help battle the pandemic that has since infected 60 million people around the world. Among the first tasks: studying how a virus that doesn't harm chimps can infect humans and devastate their immune systems.

Robertson says he leg-pressed 2,000 pounds

Muscular Christianity may have peaked a century ago, but at least one evangelical leader still clings to the notion. Pat Robertson says he leg-pressed 2,000 pounds:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he has leg-pressed 2,000 pounds. The feat is recounted on the Christian Broadcasting Network Web site, in a posting headlined, "How Pat Robertson Leg Pressed 2,000 Pounds."

It's a pretty stupid claim to make:

Clay Travis of CBS SportsLine.coms online magazine called the assertion impossible in a column this week, writing that the leg-press record for football players at Florida State University is 665 pounds less.

"Where in the world did Robertson even find a machine that could hold 2,000 pounds at one time?" Travis asked.

Perhaps — I'm being charitable here — his people thought the weight was in kilos and multiplied it by 2.2 to get pounds.

Why Your Boss Is Overpaid

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) uses "tournament theory" to explain Why Your Boss Is Overpaid:

Lazear and Rozen's tournament theory has stood the test of time and been supported by many subsequent pieces of empirical research. It also passes the smell test: The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has to do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work for a promotion. As Lazear wrote in his book, Personnel Economics for Managers, "The salary of the vice president acts not so much as motivation for the vice president as it does as motivation for the assistant vice presidents."

Economists don't even pretend that your boss deserves his salary. Suddenly, everything is clear.

Transform teaching now

Transform teaching now looks at the quality of American teachers:

Released by the well-respected American Institutes for Research, the report measured college students' ability to interpret real-world documents and texts like newspaper stories and editorials. It also measured practical math skills such as comparing the cost per ounce of food items. Science and engineering majors had the highest scores, not just in math but also in language. Education major scores were lowest overall.

Why has the quality of teachers declined?

The problem is partly generational. Fifty years ago, schools had a captive labor market because women were confined to a few professions like nursing and teaching. Now, thankfully, women can be doctors, lawyers and CEOs, too. But that means schools have to compete much harder for talent, something few are equipped to do.

Aardvark Mother and Baby

This Aardvark Mother and Baby just brightened my day:

One of the newest additions to the Brookfield Zoo, a female aardvark named Paatsy, right, sticks close to her mother, Gracie, during mealtime Thursday, May 25, 2006, at the zoo in Brookfield, Ill. It will still be several more weeks before Paatsy, born March 30, makes her debut before zoo visitors. Zookeepers and researchers were able to accurately predict Paatsy's date of birth by analyzing hormone levels in her mother's fecal samples, giving them time to prepare the birthing area for her arrival.

Dracula's castle returned to Van Hapsburg

From Dracula's castle returned to Van Hapsburg:

More than 60 years after it was seized by communists, the Romanian government is to hand back one of the country's most popular tourist sites, the fabled Dracula Castle, to its former owner, the culture minister said Tuesday.

The castle, worth an estimated $25 million, was owned by the late Queen Marie and bequeathed to her daughter Princess Ileana in 1938. It was confiscated by communists in 1948 and fell into disrepair. It will be transferred on Friday to Dominic van Hapsburg, a New York architect who inherited the castle from Princess Ileana decades after the communists seized it, minister Adrian Iorgulescu told a news conference.

Van Hapsburg is a descendant of the Hapsburg dynasty which ruled Romania for a period starting in the late 17th century.

Polar Bear at Asahiyama Zoo

This Polar Bear at the Asahiyama Zoo has a visitor — who appears to be in a flying saucer:

A visitor looks at a polar bear through an acrylic capsule at Asahiyama Zoo in Asahikawa, northern Japan May 22, 2006. The zoo, known as its unique interactive animal viewing facilities, is one of the most popular zoos in Japan, and about 2.07 million people visited in the previous year, the zoo official said.

Florida angler lands what may be record shark

Florida angler lands what may be record shark:

Fishing Capt. Bucky Dennis has been trying to catch a record hammerhead shark for 10 years. He may have finally succeeded.

On Tuesday, he reeled in a monstrous 1,280-pounder that ate a 25-pound stingray for bait at Boca Grande Pass near Fort Myers. That would beat by nearly 300 pounds the current all-tackle world record for a hammerhead shark.

Dennis, who was using 130-pound test line, and three friends fought the 14 1/2 foot shark for five hours and it dragged his boat about 12 miles offshore before they got it aboard.

"It's fun hooking them, but if you get too close, they will bite," Dennis said. "And whatever they bite, they will bite off."

The current all-tackle world record hammerhead is 991 pounds, caught May 30, 1982, by Allen Ogle of Punta Gorda, according to the International Game Fish Association. The organization is reviewing the latest catch to determine if it qualifies as the new record, a process that will take about 60 days.

The Port Charlotte fishing captain donated the big fish to the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, which plans to have it mounted and displayed. Center director Robert Hueter said researchers prefer that people tag and release large sharks because they help sustain the species.

"But we are grateful that this animal has been donated to science. It will help us understand more about these animals," Hueter said.

The largest shark ever hooked was a 2,664-pound great white caught off the southern coast of Australia in 1959.

Biopharm Thrilla in Manila

Dr. Henry I. Miller describes the Biopharm Thrilla in Manila:

The early-stage R&D I saw during my travels was astonishing. University of the Philippines, Manila, Professor Nina Barzaga — "The Illustrious Nina," as she is known locally — has introduced into banana plants the genes that express potential vaccine proteins for typhoid fever, rabies and the HIV virus. She and her collaborators intend to process the bananas sufficiently to be able to standardize the dose — by converting them to dried banana chips, for example — and then to carry out clinical testing.

Pupils perform 'alarming' feat

I've mentioned the Mosquito before. Now it's been hijacked. From Pupils perform 'alarming' feat:

A high-pitched alarm which cannot be heard by adults has been hijacked by schoolchildren to create ringtones so they can get away with using phones in class.

Techno-savvy pupils have adapted the Mosquito alarm, used to drive teenage gangs away from shopping centres.

The alarm, which has been praised by police, is highly effective because its ultra-high sound can be heard only by youths but not by most people over 20.

Schoolchildren have recorded the sound, which they named Teen Buzz, and spread it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth technology.

Now they can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on.

How to Be Silicon Valley

In How to Be Silicon Valley, Paul Graham asks, "Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?"

What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.
[...]
I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

Some near misses:

Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds like.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But Carnegie-Mellon? The record skips at that point. Lower down the list, the University of Washington yielded a high-tech community in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin yielded one in Austin. But what happened in Pittsburgh? And in Ithaca, home of Cornell, which is also high on the list?

I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can answer for both. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there's no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is in Boston. Rich people don't want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. So while there are plenty of hackers who could start startups, there's no one to invest in them.

Read the whole essay.

Egyptian Tortoise

Baby animals, even baby reptiles, are cute, like this Egyptian Tortoise:

A new born Egyptian tortoise sits on the finger of its keeper at Chester Zoo, north west England, May 23, 2006. The zoo has hatched six of the tortoises also known as Testudo Kleinmanni, which are currently on the critically endangered list.

A Barrel Roll while Pouring Iced Tea

Pilot Bob Hoover demonstrates a number of aerobatic feats, including A Barrel Roll while Pouring Iced Tea. Watch the video and listen to him describe what the difficult part is.

A Liberal Teaches Republicans About Free Markets

In A Liberal Teaches Republicans About Free Markets, Andrew Roth cites a speech by Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) that should shame hypocritical Republicans:

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations. So I appreciate the leadership of the gentleman from Arizona [Jeff Flake] and the gentleman from Oregon [Roy Blumenauer]. Here is a chance for some of my free-enterprise-professing friends to get honest with themselves, and now maybe we will see some born-again free enterprisers in the agricultural field.

Mysterious Tibet

The architecture of Mysterious Tibet retains a unique Tibetan-ness despite its obvious foreign influences:

Tibetan architecture contains Chinese and Indian influences, and reflects a deeply Buddhist approach. The Buddhist wheel, along with two dragons, can be seen on nearly every Gompa in Tibet. The design of the Tibetan Chortens can vary, from roundish walls in Kham to squarish, four-sided walls in Ladakh.

The most unusual feature of Tibetan architecture is that many of the houses and monasteries are built on elevated, sunny sites facing the south, and are often made out a mixture of rocks, wood, cement and earth. Little fuel is available for heat or lighting, so flat roofs are built to conserve heat, and multiple windows are constructed to let in sunlight. Walls are usually sloped inwards at 10 degrees as a precaution against frequent earthquakes in the mountainous area.

Study: No marijuana link to lung cancer

Study: No marijuana link to lung cancer — despite the fact that "smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco":

Marijuana smoking does not increase a person's risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.

They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.

Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

Preventing Illegal Immigration

The Onion's latest "infographic" proposes some unusual methods for Preventing Illegal Immigration:

• Make U.S. jobs less cool and fun
• Act like we want hordes of Mexicans crossing border so the mystique is gone

Check out the whole list.

Top Grossing Films of All Time in the U.S. Adjusted for Inflation

Movies keep breaking box-office records, but many of those records aren't inflation adjusted. The Top Grossing Films of All Time in the U.S. Adjusted for Inflation include films from many decades:

1. Gone With the Wind (1939)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. The Sound of Music (1965)
4. E.T. (1982)
5. The Ten Commandments (1956)
6. Titanic (1997)
7. Jaws (1975)
8. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
9. The Jungle Book (1967)
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Scan This Book!

In Scan This Book!, Kevin Kelly, the "senior maverick" at Wired, notes that Google's project to scan the books of five major research libraries is bringing about an age-old dream:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed.
[...]
From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod.

Making all books portable and available is simply the first step:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

The consequences?

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

How the economics have changed:

In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a simple reason: it was much easier to make your own version of a creation than to duplicate someone else's exactly. The amount of energy and attention needed to copy a scroll exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke by stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. So most works were altered, and often improved, by the borrower before they were passed on. Fairy tales evolved mythic depth as many different authors worked on them and as they migrated from spoken tales to other media (theater, music, painting). This system worked well for audiences and performers, but the only way for most creators to earn a living from their works was through the support of patrons.

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with public works.

Not coincidentally, public libraries first began to flourish with the advent of cheap copies. Before the industrial age, libraries were primarily the property of the wealthy elite. With mass production, every small town could afford to put duplicates of the greatest works of humanity on wooden shelves in the village square. Mass access to public-library books inspired scholarship, reviewing and education, activities exempted in part from the monopoly of copyright in the United States because they moved creative works toward the public commons sooner, weaving them into the fabric of common culture while still remaining under the author's copyright. These are now known as "fair uses."

This wonderful balance was undone by good intentions. [...] As more intellectual property became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

These extended copyrights have come at a cost:

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.

Where are we headed?

As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work. Authors and artists can make (and have made) their livings selling aspects of their works other than inexpensive copies of them. They can sell performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the "discovery tool" that markets these other intangible valuables. But selling things-that-cannot-be-copied is far from ideal for many creative people. The new model is rife with problems (or opportunities). For one thing, the laws governing creating and rewarding creators still revolve around the now-fragile model of valuable copies.

Orson Scott Card on the Punic Wars

I was surprised to learn that Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game) didn't know much about the Punic Wars:

Speaking of military history, I realized a while ago that I knew absolutely nothing about the three Punic Wars except that they were fought between Rome and Carthage, the Carthaginian Hannibal was a great general, and Rome won in the end.

The Punic Wars, by Adrian Goldsworthy (Cassell & Co., 2000, 412 pp.) turned out to be the solution for my ignorance. This is an extraordinarily clear and fair-minded history of battles, strategies, and political struggles so remote in time that everything has to be pieced together from ancient sources that are often fragmentary. And the fragments we have are often unreliable, since the ancient writers had their own agendas.

As Rome expanded through central Italy, it was probably inevitable that it would collide with Carthage. The then-rich island of Sicily, divided among many city-states, lay right between the two nascent empires.

So the first war was essentially a contest for control of Sicily. Carthage was a sea-faring nation and Rome was not, so you'd think that the Carthaginians would have won handily in a struggle over an island.

But they were dealing with the Romans, and the thing about Romans was: They never gave up. Even though they had democratic institutions, the ruling class was deeply imbued with a stubborn sense of honor and entitlement that would not bend.

In other words, they didn't get a year into a war, hold some polls, and cancel the fight. Which may be one reason why Rome created an empire that dominated the Mediterranean world from the Punic Wars until Byzantium finally fell to the Turks in the fifteenth century.

Rome didn't have any ships? They built them. No trained sailors? They trained them as best they could, and the survivors of the first battles were certified as fully trained.

The first war ended with a Roman victory, but only because the Carthaginians decided it was cheaper to declare peace and pay tribute. That was their way of waging war — a Levantine way. They fought their wars with money. Their armies were mostly hired mercenaries, and they constantly weighed the cost. If surrender was cheaper than victory and left them free to continue making money, then they didn't mind "losing."

The Romans, however, had a very different view. When an enemy surrendered, the Romans regarded their surrender as permanent. From then on they were expected to behave like "allies," which to Rome meant "subject states."

The Carthaginians didn't act that way. In fact, as they carved out a new empire in Spain, under the leadership of Hannibal Barco and his relatives, the Carthaginians actually became shockingly disobedient to the Romans. Well, it was shocking to the Romans, anyway.

The result was the last war that came close to extinguishing Rome for many years. Hannibal crossed the Alps and promptly destroyed every Roman army sent against him. To the Carthaginians, it seemed obvious: Rome was defeated, so Rome should surrender, pay tribute, and everybody could go home and make money again.

Only Rome didn't know how to surrender. Or if they did, they had no intention of doing it. They kept raising new armies — of proud Roman citizens — along with troops from allied states. Unable to defeat Hannibal, they kept him busy, taking back whatever cities he had seized almost as soon as he left them. Hannibal, meanwhile, was baffled by the fact that he kept winning and yet the overall victory kept slipping out of his hands.

Finally the Romans under Scipio Africanus took the war home to Carthage in Africa, and even though Hannibal came home to try to defend his homeland, the Romans won.

The third Punic War was simply naked Roman aggression. Carthage was subservient now, but it irritated some Romans that their former enemy was rich again. So the found a ridiculous pretext for war, and despite almost desperate attempts by the Carthaginians to placate and obey Rome, it finally came to war, which Carthage lost so thoroughly that the city was utterly destroyed.

The side that refuses to lose is often the one that wins; the side that has no stomach for a longterm war, fought by its own citizens, is at a decisive disadvantage against a determined enemy. There are lessons to be learned, even from ancient times.

We may think we don't want to be Rome — after all, we're not in the empire business, and these days we obviously get bored with wars, even wars we're winning. But it's good to remember that it was the city that didn't take its wars all that seriously, the city that was willing to surrender, that eventually was destroyed. Just a thought.

Baby Siberian Tigers

Today's dose of cute comes from these three baby Siberian tigers with their mother at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province:

More than 100 Siberian tigers, one of the rarest animals, are expected to be born this year at a breeding center in China's northeast.

Fewer characters being used in written Chinese

Fewer characters being used in written Chinese:

The Chinese media is using fewer characters and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications you need only to know about 900 of the thousands of pictographs that make up the script, state media said on Tuesday.

The findings of a survey conducted by the education ministry and language commission were based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files chosen from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television, the Xinhua news agency said.
[...]
Written Chinese is made up of around 50,000 individual characters, whose main function is to represent meaning, not pronunciation.

The average university graduate, however, may know only about 6,000, as many characters are archaic and some found only once in the whole history of the written language, often describing the names of people, places or mythical beasts.

Traditional, or "complex" characters are still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and many overseas Chinese communities, though simplification is gradually creeping in as mainland China's economic clout grows and more Chinese travel abroad.

Egypt to excavate Roman city submerged in sea

Egypt to excavate Roman city submerged in sea:

The Egyptian authorities have given the go ahead for the underwater exploration of what appears to be a Roman city submerged in the Mediterranean, Egypt's top archaeologist said on Monday.

Zahi Hawass said in a statement that an excavation team had found the ruins of the Roman city 35 km (20 miles) east of the Suez Canal on Egypt's north coast.

Archaeologists had found buildings, bathrooms, ruins of a Roman fortress, ancient coins, bronze vases and pieces of pottery that all date back to the Roman era, the statement said. Egypt's Roman era lasted from 30 BC to 337 AD.

The excavation team also found four bridges that belonged to a submerged castle, part of which had been discovered on the Mediterranean coastline in 1910.

The statement said evidence indicated that part of the site was on the coast and part of it submerged in the sea. The area marked Egypt's eastern border during the Roman era.

British mothers hooked on "powerpramming"

I had assumed that this was already being done. British mothers hooked on "powerpramming":

At first, the sight of 20 red-faced women lying on the damp grass of a central London park and juggling newborn babies is quite worrying.

But this is "powerpramming," a new craze taking off in Britain in which new mothers are encouraged to use their offspring — and the inevitable baggage that comes with them — as exercise aids.

They're even promoting open source powerpramming.

From A to Zzzzz

From A to Zzzzz looks at sleep research:

Tests conducted on rhesus monkeys last year suggest that CX717 can wire users to remain awake for 36 hours without the jitters, euphoria and eventual crash that come after mega-doses of caffeine or amphetamines.

Don't we need eight hours of sleep per night?

The eight-hours mantra has no more scientific basis than the tooth fairy, says Neil Stanley, head of sleep research at the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit at the University of Surrey in Britain. He believes that everyone has their own individual “sleep need” which can be anywhere between three and 11 hours. “If you’re a three-hour-a-night person, you need three; if you're 11, you need 11.” To find out, he says, simply sleep until you wake naturally, without the aid of an alarm clock. Feel rested? That’s your sleep need.

Lost in translation

Lost in translation looks at the differences between English and German humor:

Our attitude to the Germans and their supposed lack of a sense of humour is best understood through the example of the joke known to comedy professionals such as myself as The German Child. It goes like this. An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."

The basis for most English-speaking humor is the ambiguity of the English language:

At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else. For example, it is possible to imagine any number of British stand-ups concluding a bit with something structurally similar to the following, "I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox ... and then I got off the bus." We laugh, hopefully, because the behaviour described would be inappropriate on a bus, but we had assumed it was taking place either in private or perhaps at some kind of sex club, because the word "bus" was withheld from us. Other suitable punchlines for this set-up would be, "And that was just the teachers", "I was 28-years-old" and "That's the last time I attempt to find work as a research chemist in Paraguay."

There is even a technical term used by those who direct comedy on camera to describe this one-size-fits-all mechanism. Eddie Large is gasping for air as a hot dog falls into the end of his snorkel. The shot widens to reveal Sid Little, whose sausages are flying into the air out of his hot-dog buns because he is using too much ketchup. Pull back and reveal. But German will not always allow you to shunt the key word to the end of the sentence to achieve this failsafe laugh. After spending weeks struggling with the rigours of the German language's far less flexible sentence structures to achieve the endless succession of "pull back and reveals" that constitute much English language humour, the idea of our comedic superiority soon begins to fade. It is a mansion built on sand.

Some German humor:

On my first night in Hannover I had gone out drinking with some young German actors. "You will notice there are no old buildings in Hannover," one of them said. "That is because you bombed them all." At the time I found this shocking and embarrassing. Now it seems like the funniest thing you could possibly say to a nervous English visitor.

How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions

In How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions, Tristan Yates tells a sordid tale of "exec-level FUD sales techniques and the $325/hr subcontractor labor bait and switch":

Last year, I worked as part of a project management office for one of the biggest defense contractors in the world. I was a contractor myself, getting paid by the hour to help them with project planning, forecasting, status, and other PMO and IT advisory functions. So when IBM conned them out of millions of dollars, I was sitting right in the front row.

A great line:

The second consultant's job was more sinister. He was a thought leader.

Here's where the hammer falls:

At this point, IBM Global Services consultants flooded our conference rooms. Overnight, we ended up with twenty consultants. When I asked how much these consultants were costing us, I was told $250/hr. This information proved to be incorrect - they were actually charging us $325/hr.

What were we getting for $325/hr? People hired off of Monster and Careerbuilder. Seriously.

Management was under the assumption that we would be getting real implementation experts from IBM. In fact, we were getting employees from a subcontractor. We paid IBM $325/hr, and they paid their subcontractor about $165/hr. The subcontractor then paid its people salaries of $90,000 to $110,000/yr, the market average, which equates to about $75/hr when benefits are included. We were paying a markup of about 333%.
[...]
We had expected IBM to stay for about three months, which all by itself would have blown our budget, given their $325/hr bill rate. But they were in our company for more than seven months, burning through more than a quarter million dollars a week. And Global Services wasn't the entirety of the IBM damage. We still had licensing and support fees for Websphere, Websphere Portal, Websphere Content Management, Tivoli Access Manager, and DB2.

Pyramid is giant farming clock

It's not quite Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's something. Pyramid is giant farming clock:

Benfer stumbled across the temple while trawling through a green valley floor in search of information about ancient diets. Working with a number of Peruvian colleagues, he unearthed a 30ft-high pyramid that had once been brightly painted red and white. He believes that it served its community, known as the Kotosh people, for 800 years.

The 20-acre site is dominated by two buildings. The northern pyramid, which Benfer has called the Temple of the Fox after a painting of the animal, is built around a priests’ platform.

This points at 114 degrees directly to an 8ft tall carved head on a mountain ridge nearly 200ft away. On December 21 each year, just before the local River Chillon starts flooding, a constellation known to Andeans as the fox swings into the sightline. According to Andean myth, the fox is the creature that taught farmers how to cultivate plants.

To the south, another temple holds a scowling clay head, which Benfer believes represents the earth goddess Pachamama. It aligns with stars that line up when the harvest is due to be gathered.

Move over Hollywood

John Patterson and Gareth McLean say, Move over Hollywood:

Today, US television is where cultural debates are sparked, and where popular culture renews and reinvigorates itself. Over the past 10 years, TV has slowly seized the creative initiative from the movies and run with it, all the way to the Emmys — and to the bank. With entire seasons of TV shows available on DVD and cheap iPod downloads of popular shows online, television is now teeming with beautifully written, well-made programmes, including The Sopranos, Deadwood, Law & Order and its many spin-offs, Lost, 24, Six Feet Under, The Shield and Nip/Tuck. Umbilically connected to the internet, TV is also able to attach itself swiftly to new currents in subterranean culture and bring them to viewers in a matter of days. This inventiveness affects all areas, from news to drama. And it is because of the sudden upsurge in TV drama, along with the immense fortunes to be made in it, that so many names we associate with the cinema are moving to television.

An amusing metaphor:

Going to the movies has become like buying hardback books; those with patience may opt to wait for the DVD, the paperback.

How the economics are changing:

It used to be that TV producers made 22 shows a year while grinding towards the magic number, Episode 100, when syndication of a successful show on local stations commences. At that point, with residuals kicking in and points finally being counted, the major players all stood to make a fortune. Today, the money starts to pour in the moment the first season has its DVD release, usually in the run-up to season two. And iPod downloads for a couple of dollars mean that a hit show can start minting money the morning after it is broadcast. This year's flood of pilot directors suggests that more of them are becoming aware of how lucrative TV can be, compared with notoriously undependable movie projects. They're tempted by executive producer titles that, if the pilot goes to a series and becomes a hit, can earn them enormous fees and back-end deals.

Big Blues: Why IBM Is in Trouble

In Big Blues, Cringely looks at "Why IBM Is in Trouble":

IBM project management is not based on business results. It is based on documented deniability. A successful IBM project is completing everything as originally documented. If it works or not, it doesn't matter.

Of course, the same thing could be said of most consulting firms.

D-I-Y Hedge Funds

Dominic Basulto discusses D-I-Y Hedge Funds:

During Steinhardt's hedge fund heyday, fewer than 500 funds dominated the industry. Now, there are nearly 10,000 funds with more than $1.5 trillion under management. As a result, hedge fund strategies have infiltrated every corner of the investment industry. Seemingly every day, retail investors are introduced to new opportunities that didn't exist 10 years ago. Heck, these opportunities — like new "mini-futures" for playing the commodities boom — didn't even exist 30 days ago. At one time, the average investor needed a minimum of $1 million to play in the high-stakes hedge fund world. Today, it's possible to construct a do-it-yourself hedge fund or buy an off-the-shelf hedge fund for less than $2,000. The hedge fund genie, as they say, is out of the bottle.

John Stossel's 'Stupid in America'

John Stossel's 'Stupid in America' looks at "How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education":

I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12 years, he still couldn't read.

So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to.

Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up two grade levels — after just 72 hours of instruction.

His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian's progress but disappointed with his public schools. "With Sylvan, it's a huge improvement. And they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're on point. But I can't say the same for the public schools," she said.

Best Places For Business

Forbes lists its Best Places For Business:

Rank

Metro Area	Cost of Doing Business1	Job Growth2	Educational Attainment3	Population
1	Albuquerque NM	1	60	54	793,100
2	Raleigh NC	43	52	11	934,200
3	Houston TX	21	77	70	5,257,100
4	Boise ID	51	22	91	534,100
5	Knoxville TN	26	35	93	654,200
6	Phoenix AZ	55	16	88	3,813,000
7	Nashville TN	28	64	79	1,414,000
8	Durham NC	24	117	6	457,600
9	Fayetteville AR	23	7	141	399,700
10	Indianapolis IN	47	80	64	1,637,300

Zoo visitors watch bears kill monkey

Zoo visitors watch bears kill monkey:

Visitors reported that the grisly scene began as several bears chased the monkey, a macaque, onto a wooden structure at Beekse Bergen Safari Park.

They said a bear tried unsuccessfully to shake the monkey loose, ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it. The bear then climbed up and grabbed the monkey, mauling it to death and bringing it to its concrete den, where three bears ate it.