Factoid of the day
“According to the Gartner research firm, 40 percent of the earth’s population will be carrying cellphones by 2009.” (Source: New York Times, 4 Aug. 2005)
Labyrinth Nation
Reader Dan Brown (no, not The DaVinci Code guy) sends this photo of the labyrinth at the Bayview Medical Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. As some of you know, this labyrinth figures in Chapter 9 of A Whole New Mind. Dan has more cool labyrinthine photos on Flickr.
Take me to your liter
Iconoculture reports that Italian winemaker Modulgraf “will launch a line of wine labels implanted with chips that transmit audio information about the wine.” What is the winery trying to accomplish? “The idea is to bring the oenologist to the table so that each wine can explain itself in the first person,” says a company rep.
The new brain drain
As Filipino actors, dancers, and playrights head to the West for career opportunities, the Philippines is experiencing what some call a “right-brain drain.”
Is imitation the sincerest form of journalism?
Everybody and his sister has emailed me about the cover story in the new Business Week. It’s a good piece, but a few paragraphs sound a tad, er, familiar. Here’s an (annotated) sample: “The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new — call it the Creativity Economy. Even as policymakers
Put your cell phone on I.C.E.
PC Magazine reports that in the wake of the London bombings, the U.K. has stepped up its campaign to have people include an “I.C.E” (in case of emergency) listing on their cell phone contact list: “U.K.-based paramedic Bob Brotchie came up with the plan after having difficulty getting emergency contact information from injured patients. In
Book recommendation
Just finished reading Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. In this short, simply written book, Kang Chol-Hwan tells how his grandparents, like other Korean immigrants in the 1970s, were lured from Japan back to North Korea to help build a workers’ paradise. What a horrifying sham it turned out to be.
Readers write. Well. (Part 2)
Those mini-sagas are pouring in. All of them (okay, most of them) have been quite good. But my favorite so far is this, which comes from a reader who’ll identify him or herself only as TBuddha: The Light The light enveloped me with an intensity and warmth like I had never known. Looking around, I
Is “book” a verb?
That’s what Cory Doctorow says in this interesting Kevin Maney column on the future of books.