notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

2013-04-24

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photo 01:06:22
joshuanguyen: One chart can speak volumes about politics, history, technology, and the human race. This chart explains why the golden age for the British is widely seen as being pre-WW2 and why Americans hark back the post-war period so much. (For all the talk of American decline, note their share of GDP is still massively out of scale with their percentage of the population (which is nearer five than twenty).

joshuanguyen:

One chart can speak volumes about politics, history, technology, and the human race.

This chart explains why the golden age for the British is widely seen as being pre-WW2 and why Americans hark back the post-war period so much. (For all the talk of American decline, note their share of GDP is still massively out of scale with their percentage of the population (which is nearer five than twenty).

2013-03-15

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quote 17:15:30
“ Otherwise, Wang poured out his unhappiness. The hackers were required to speak English, the international language of technology, as well as an essential for phishing attacks on mostly U.S. targets. But when Wang tried to hone his English skills by reading magazines such as the Economist and Harvard Business Review, his boss rebuked him for reading too much foreign press. ”
China hacker’s angst opens a window onto cyber-espionage - latimes.com (via iamdanw)

(via iamdanw)

2013-01-14

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quote 23:27:46
“ In August 2012 two schools in San Antonio, Texas, embedded RFID tags in identity badges belonging to their 4,200 students. These help administrators to count students who turn up to class but miss the morning register. Because funding is linked to daily attendance, the system enables schools to claim more taxpayer cash. On January 8th a court lifted an earlier injunction halting the expulsion of a child who refused to wear the badge on religious grounds (some Christians liken the devices to the Mark of the Beast, foreseen in the Bible). The family intends to appeal. ”
Modern families: Chips off the old block, in The Economist.

2012-12-06

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photos 00:21:00

instagram:

Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s king and the world’s longest-serving head of state, turns 85 years old today. King Bhumibol, also known as Rama IX, has ruled Thailand for more than 66 years, and is a popular figure throughout the country.

Well, yes, I suppose it does look that way, given if you get caught sending text messages that don’t approve of the king, you can get twenty years in prison. Still, good to see Instagram covering corrupt regimes. I’m looking forward to their highlights of photos from North Korea and Bahrain.

2012-05-24

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photos 18:29:05

The US/Asian and European covers of this week’s Economist.

2012-04-30

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quote 22:01:24
“ There are roughly 105m multichannel TV households in America, of which 77m do not subscribe to HBO. By contrast, he reckons, there are only about 3m households with broadband connections and reasonable amounts of money but no multichannel TV. It makes sense to go after the bigger group. ”

Bill Nelson, HBO’s chief executive, paraphrased in the Economist’s article from last August: HBO and the future of pay TV.

(Re-reading that article was prompted by a friend asking why I hadn’t streamed Veep to see if I liked it. The answer is that I can’t pay HBO to let me do so.)

2012-01-03

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quote 18:39:39
“ According to studies by Erle Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the vast majority of ecosystems on the planet now reflect the presence of people. There are, for instance, more trees on farms than in wild forests. ”
From The Anthropocene: A man-made world in The Economist. A good read (which I belatedly got to).

2011-12-21

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quote 22:30:32
“ At a “processing centre” in El Paso, where the fingerprints of those caught crossing from Mexico illegally are taken and checked against various databases, there is precious little processing going on. Of the 20-odd workstations, only two are manned. The Border Patrol agents sitting at them chat idly to themselves. Just two detainees, their paperwork complete, sit timidly in the corner of an enormous holding cell. An adjacent cell for women stands empty. Next door, three more agents scan 25 screens relaying footage from video cameras along the border, looking for possible incursions. In some of the grainy pictures, scrubby and deserted patches of creosote and mesquite sway in a gentle wind; in others, herons peck at fish in the shallow trickle of the Rio Grande. Asked whether anything is going on, an agent replies, “it’s really quiet today. ”
The Economist: Immigration- Crying Wolf, from the 19th November issue this year. The combination of massive U.S. border enforcement manpower and a reduced incentive to enter illegally mean the number of crossings is far below its peak of ten years ago.

2011-07-28

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photo 21:31:53
theeconomist: Daily chart: where the world’s livestock lives. There are three times as many chickens as humans, according to new statistics from the UN. China has more chickens than any other country, yet tiny Brunei boasts 40 birds per citizen. On the full Economist page, there’s this surprising (to me, anyway) nugget: New Zealand lives up to its reputation as the world’s most productive shepherd, with 7.5 sheep for each New Zealander. It is also the second biggest cattle herdsman, with the equivalent of 2.3 cows per person Unfortunately, you’d never get the cattle figure from the chart, because they’re ranked by population, not per-capita population. I think that’s a shame, because the per-capita figures are the more interesting of the two. (Look at Denmark’s 2.24 pigs per person, far higher than anything else in that top twenty. Presumably all that bacon they used to advertise on British TV was actually Danish.)

theeconomist:

Daily chart: where the world’s livestock lives. There are three times as many chickens as humans, according to new statistics from the UN. China has more chickens than any other country, yet tiny Brunei boasts 40 birds per citizen.

On the full Economist page, there’s this surprising (to me, anyway) nugget:

New Zealand lives up to its reputation as the world’s most productive shepherd, with 7.5 sheep for each New Zealander. It is also the second biggest cattle herdsman, with the equivalent of 2.3 cows per person

Unfortunately, you’d never get the cattle figure from the chart, because they’re ranked by population, not per-capita population. I think that’s a shame, because the per-capita figures are the more interesting of the two. (Look at Denmark’s 2.24 pigs per person, far higher than anything else in that top twenty. Presumably all that bacon they used to advertise on British TV was actually Danish.)

2011-02-12

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quote 18:38:10
“ The more open and multifarious the city becomes, the more it attracts people who want it to stay that way. “London”, says Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, “increasingly defines itself by having moved a step farther along the path of cosmopolitanism than anywhere else on the planet.” The most interesting aspect of the city’s bid for the 2012 Olympics was not its victory but the nature of its campaign, which sold London as the ultimate global city rather than a British one. ”
Londonism and its adherents: The capital’s creed from The Economist (via Russell)
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