Don't you get it?

What makes you happy is keeping the other guy down.

The data show that what matters on the happiness front is not how much money you have, but whether you have more (or less) at any given time than everyone else.

Pew Research Center: Are We Happy Yet?

This is a rather unorthodox (but welcome) way for the military to do business. Basically, you pay Danny Hillis lots of money to bring dazzlingly brilliant minds to bear on your problems.

Applied Minds, Glendale, Calif., and Raytheon Co., Tucson, Ariz., was awarded on 1 December 2005, a $30,000,000 indefinite delivery/ indefinite quantity contract to establish Innovation-Nodes (iNodes), which will be small, flexible organizations that execute Rapid Reaction Innovation solution efforts or tasks. iNodes assemble teams from a network of experts, supply teams with the infrastructure and enablers that allow them to accomplish their jobs quickly and effectively, and quickly innovate, demonstrate, and deliver prototypical hardware, software, integrated systems solutions, or services to solve urgent operator or other user problems. The Air Force can issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum indicated above, although actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $100,000 has been obligated. This work will be complete by November 2008. Solicitation began September 2005 and negotiations were complete November 2005. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, NM, is the contracting activity.

See this presentation.

DoD Buys iNodes from Danny Hillis' Applied Minds

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is nominated for best documentary feature. The film is based on the book, The Smartest Guys in the Room.

You can listen to audio recordings of conversations between traders.

The film concludes with a note that the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling begins in January 2006. Now is the time ...

For continuing coverage from the Washington Post, check out Special Report: Enron Trial

Ebert's review:

There is a general impression that Enron was a good corporation that went bad. The movie argues that it was a con game almost from the start.

The most shocking material in the film involves the fact that Enron cynically and knowingly created the phony California energy crisis. There was never a shortage of power in California. Using tape recordings of Enron traders on the phone with California power plants, the film chillingly overhears them asking plant managers to "get a little creative" in shutting down plants for "repairs." Between 30 percent and 50 percent of California's energy industry was shut down by Enron a great deal of the time, and up to 76 percent at one point, as the company drove the price of electricity higher by nine times.

"The more fundamental issue is that journals do not and cannot guarantee the truth of what they publish," said Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times. "Publication of a paper only means that, in the view of the referees who green-light it, it is interesting and not obviously false. In other words, all of the results in these journals are tentative."

Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify

Bolivian president Evo Morales has a 74 percent approval rating.

He has long opposed American eradication efforts and championed the coca leaf, which without significant processing has no mind-altering effects and is chewed here to mitigate hunger and increase stamina. He has pledged to push the foreign governments to open their markets to the many legal products that can be made from coca, like soap, shampoo, toothpaste and flour. He also wants to open markets to coca tea, which is legal and popular in the Andes.

"If there's one thing the international community should do, if only out of deference because he won the election, is to take seriously his arguments that coca products have a place in the international commodities market."

"One of our most important products is granola, fortified with coca. Right now, we are selling everything in Bolivia, but the hope is to sell in China."

"What we want to show is that the coca leaf is not just for cocaine."

No to Cocaine, but Yes to Coca

The only major difference between doing business in Iraq and any other place in the world, said Mr. Sawiris, is having to negotiate with kidnappers.

Egyptian Mobile Phone Provider Treads Where Others Dare Not

A Small Change In Plan

As government documents go, the QDR came wreathed in glamour, like a new novel from Tom Wolfe, grand and rare.

If you read closely in the barrage of weighty tomes they put out in recent days, you might discover that the Rumsfeld era is over, and Rumsfeld lost.

"The number of books translated by the whole Arab world over the past thousand years is equivalent to the numbers of books translated by Spain in one year."

Rumsfeld's Algeria Agenda: Arms Sales and Closer Ties

"They have things they desire, and we have things we can be helpful with."

"It's instructive for us to realize that the struggle we're in is not unlike the struggle that the people of Algeria went through."

Rumsfeld Jokes Ready to Run Horse Ranch

Ranch manager Amid Abdelhamid showed Rumsfeld such items as a saddle fashioned from crocodile skin and explained, among other things, the pros and cons of using frozen sperm to breed horses. He also told Rumsfeld of his travels searching to buy the world's best horses.

"You've got the best job in the world," Rumsfeld told Abdelhamid. "Any time you want to trade jobs, I'll do it."

"You're doin' a heckuva job, Rummy!"

Mr. Rumsfeld's Flawed Vision

Rumsfeld's Quadrennial Defense Review, delivered last week in sync with the Pentagon's budget proposal for fiscal 2007, is a disappointment. While it envisions a partial adjustment of the armed forces to what it calls "the long war," it dodges almost all the hard decisions that Mr. Rumsfeld should have made.

Rumsfeld merely bequeaths to his successor the tough decisions about weapons. One thing that military analysts agree on is that, even given the 40 percent increase in defense spending during the Bush administration -- including 7 percent for next year -- there will not be enough money to pay for the four dozen systems under development.

Max Boot on QDR and '07 Budget

The entire budget for language and cultural training -- $181 million -- comes to less than the cost of one F-35.

Attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and fighter aircraft may be glamorous, but they are almost entirely useless.

Miscalls on QDR

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide, with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life or we will succeed in changing theirs."

It would be difficult for war objectives to be stated in more maximalist terms. Either they will succeed in turning us into Taliban-style Muslims or we will turn them into happy consumers in globalism's Brave New World. Since most Americans would rather be dead than Talibans and most pious Muslims would rather perish than lose their souls to Brave New World, Rumsfeld has proclaimed a war of mutual annihilation. That will indeed be another Thirty Years' War, with little chance of a renewed Westphalian order as the outcome.

The Internet has a rising star whose name isn't Google. Just over 2 years old, MySpace now has 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google

The development comes as the leading portal, Yahoo, becomes more like MySpace, starting a social-networking service called 360 and buying content-sharing sites such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.

MySpace rises as new online star

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a prominent Austin lawyer while the two men were on a quail hunting expedition in South Texas on Saturday, firing shotgun pellets at the man while trying to aim for a bird, his spokeswoman confirmed today.

Mr. Cheney, a practiced hunter, sprayed the lawyer, Harry Whittington, with shotgun pellets on an outing on the Armstrong ranch in South Texas. Mr. Whittington, 78, was flown by helicopter to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition today, according to Michele Trevino, a hospital spokeswoman.

UPDATE: Letters to the editor:

This may be the most famous vice-presidential shooting since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Cheney Accidentally Shoots a Fellow Hunter

Tom Friedman referenced this quote in a recent essay.

Thumbing his nose at the impotent west, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taunts us: "Our enemies cannot do a damn thing. We do not need you at all. But you are in need of the Iranian nation." And he is absolutely right.

Iran Does Not Need You