Americans want to believe that all good things go together. But here is a telling example of why that's not always true.

Check out the article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Afghanistan Could Be The Next Iraq | Fareed Zakaria

"IBM is in a long-term decline, and now they're talking about being a software company. This is my problem: They're still a massive services company," says Fred Hickey, editor of the High-Tech Strategist newsletter. "And buying back shares, generating 'other income' and enforcing patents is not, to my mind, a good long-term story."

Palmisano and his lieutenants aim to change that perception, in part by emphasizing strong profits, even in an environment where information-technology spending growth has slumped to single digits. The plan is to sell corporate "solutions" that integrate offerings from all three of IBM's massive product lines.

The vision now? To make the services division look more like software.

This is only one part of the full Barron's article, but it's what I could find for linking ...

The New IBM | Barron's

With the Taliban resurgent, reconstruction faltering, and opium poppy cultivation at an all-time high, Afghanistan is at risk of collapsing into chaos. If Washington wants to save the international effort there, it must increase its commitment to the area and rethink its strategy -- especially its approach to Pakistan, which continues to give sanctuary to insurgents on its tribal frontier.

Get Fareed Zakaria's take on this article in his latest Newsweek column.

Saving Afghanistan - Barnett R. Rubin | Foreign Affairs

It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Smashing The Clock

This is some funny stuff.

White Progressive People Fight Racism - A Zebro Documentary | YouTube

This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.

Included below are some external links for those wanting further information on the various ideas.

They call it reverse graffiti; oh, yeah; contrast with "graffiti without consequences", and traffic calming art ... Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ... Dmitri Medvedev controls one-fifth of the world’s natural gas reserves ... Rods from God, "rediscovered" in the Transformation Flight Plan -- look for "Hypervelocity Rod Bundles"; Aerotropolis: "Access, access, access is replacing location, location, location" ... and now we have traffic management for buildings ... traffic begets more traffic ... in real life, they say you can never escape 1) death or 2) taxes, but for the time being, Second Life has killed the second one.

"He had a penchant for pinks. He was always trying to sneak pinks ... Ambient Addition consists of two headphones with transparent earpieces, each equipped with a microphone and a speaker. The microphones sample the background noise in the immediate vicinity — wind blowing through the trees, traffic, a cellphone conversation. Then, with the help of a small digital signal-processing chip, the headphones make music from these sounds.

Considering all of the eyes in the MemeStreams logo, you'd think the site would get more donations ... The city of Atlanta purchased Bellwood Quarry, which will be transformed into a 300-acre park ... ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

The Year in Ideas, 2006 | The New York Times Magazine

Readers of the FBI can't hack thread might find this worthwhile.

"Where is God's Paradise?" is a question asked of all who would be mujahedeen, and you'll soon know the answer by heart: "Under the shadow of the swords."

If only the FBI had such snappy code phrases.

Have you seen this show?

"Sleeper Cell" proves itself to be one of the most compelling programs on television.

Under the Shadow of Swords

I found this article during a literature search about architectural patterns (mainly in the computer science context).

The traditionally intimate relationship between architecture and mathematics changed in the twentieth century. Architecture students are no longer required to have a mathematical background. While a problem in itself, a far more serious possibility is that contemporary architecture and design may be promoting an anti-mathematical mind-set. The modernist movement suppresses pattern in architecture, and this has profound implications for society as a whole. Mathematics is a science of patterns, and the presence or absence of patterns in our surroundings influences how easily one is able to grasp concepts that rely on patterns. Eliminating patterns from twentieth-century architecture affects our capacity to process and interpret patterns in thought. Mathematics, and the intellectual patterns it embodies, lie outside our contemporary, explicitly anti-pattern architectural world-view.

The value of Alexander's Pattern Language is that it is not about specific building types, but about building blocks that can be combined in an infinite number of ways. This implies a more mathematical, combinatoric approach to design in general.

Architectural education tends to focus on trying to develop "creativity". A student is urged to invent new designs -- with the severe constraint not to be influenced by anything from the past -- but is not taught how to verify if they are solutions. This approach ignores and suppresses patterns in solution space. Contemporary architectural theory can only validate designs by how closely they conform to some arbitrary stylistic dictate. The only way to avoid coming back to traditional architectural patterns -- which work so well -- is to block the deductive process that relates an effect with its cause. By deliberately ignoring the consequences of design decisions, architectural and urban mistakes are repeated over and over again, with the same disastrous consequences each time.

Architecture, Patterns, and Mathematics | Nexus Network Journal

This is a review of Martin Gardner's "new" book, the latest edition of The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry, from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings.

What is mathematics about? That is not so easy to explain. With biology, say, we know where we are.

Even if we take the heroic (or foolhardy) Platonic option that they are inhabitants of an abstract world beyond space and time, which we access through a mysterious faculty of intuition, we are left with no understanding of what mathematics tells us about the actual world we live in.

So by default mathematics has often been considered as not about anything at all.

Neither of those views of mathematics is correct.

The easiest object of mathematics to appreciate is symmetry. ... palindromes have a perfect symmetry.

On the one hand, bilateral symmetry—the simple left-repeats-right symmetry of an isosceles triangle, a palindrome, or the human body—would seem to be so simple as to exhaust very quickly what could be said about it.

Still, it is amazing what can be said about very little.

... They [stereoisomers] are in one sense chemically the same, but living things can tell the difference. The difference in the smell of oranges and lemons is caused by right and left forms of limonene.

The book is not as successful on physics as on mathematics. That is not Gardner’s fault. It is the fault of physics. Physicists keep changing their story ...

... somewhere in obscure parts of the subatomic realm, the universe can “tell the difference” between left-handed and right-handed.

Life & left-handedness

This is a neat site.

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