Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.

Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better.

This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true.

Why There Aren't More Googles

A weak dollar, rising fuel prices, and a global recession are all conspiring to undermine the cost advantage of offshoring. Oh, and then there's those pesky rising wages in places like the Pearl River Delta and Bangalore. The world really is flat... as BusinessWeek reports:

Duke University professor Arie Lewin estimates that the benefit of doing business, from a labor-cost point of view, in such locales as Bangalore, India, will disappear for some companies in three to four years.

Last week, we saw that a similar trend is undermining China's manufacturing advantage (also in BW):

A new Chinese labor law that took effect on Jan. 1 has significantly raised costs in an already tight labor market. Soaring commodity and energy prices, as well as Beijing's cancellation of preferential policies for exporters, have hammered manufacturers. The appreciation of the Chinese currency has shrunk already razor-thin margins, pushed thousands of manufacturers to the edge of bankruptcy, and threatened China's role as the preeminent exporter of low-priced goods.

Looks like the world really is flat - but not in terms of how much it costs to access labor in developing countries. Rather, things are starting to cost the same regardless of where you do it.

The World... Now Flatter Than Even Tom Friedman Ever Imagined

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

Up and Then Down

Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading. In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual. As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves "our brains were never wired to read". Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes.

Look and learn

I have always believed one should date a poem by the year it is started, not the lifespan of the poet. This is the ko-sakka-sensu, or Old Style of Poems; while not, perhaps, as rooted in the disciplines of high, or courtly, Ki Do, there is something in its stateliness that I find moving. Gobanu-sama permits me this deviation; symmetry is the enemy of excellence, after all.

Besides, I have not yet finished this poem. It is still too long. When I first composed it, it had one hundred and thirty words. Think of that! One hundred and thirty words. All the secrets of the universe could probably nest in the soil of one hundred and thirty words and still have space to breathe. Ido, Gobanu-sama's predecessor, was indulgent in his great age. He listened to the entire poem, from start to finish. He told me that there were one hundred and twenty four unnecessary words in my poem; and then he died.

After seventy-one years of work, it is now down to seventeen.

Strange Horizons Fiction: Ki Do (The Way of the Trees), by Sarah Thomas

(Something about how the French dislike Guantanamo)

D.J Zidane: Guantanamo

What, in effect, do we want from the Middle East? Any answer must be tentative and subject to revision periodically. At the present, the answer seems to me to be sufficient peace to prevent a world war and a sufficient flow of oil to maintain the European economy. The first is the common interest of most Arabs, who are in earnest when they insist on "positive neutralism." Of the second, two points must be made: on the one hand, Europe now depends for 80 per cent of her oil on the Middle East, but she could be supplied, admittedly at greater cost, from other sources. On the other hand, the sale of oil is the major source of revenue for many of the Arab countries and is the only hope for those who plan, as does the new generation of nationalists, large-scale development programs—and the only customer for all of the Middle Eastern oil is Europe. Let us not forget that our essential policy interests are identical with those of the Arabs.

The Lesson of Iraq | December 1958 Atlantic Monthly

We're the YouTube Generation, living in the YouTube Era, in a YouTube World. And now we apparently have a YouTube Divorce.

Wife takes divorce drama online, vents scorn via YouTube

The next time you come face to face with a dog wagging its tail, you can make a quick determination on whether to reach out and pet it or step back in deference: check the tail-wag bias. If the wagging tail leans to the dog’s right, you’re safe; if the tail leans to the dog’s left, don’t move.

Wag the Dog

Even the idlest stroll through Cambridge, England, calls to mind a pantheon of great scientific minds, but none is greater than Isaac Newton, who revolutionized the world of “natural philosophy” while the rest of England was paralyzed by the plague. Reading an enlightening new biography by Peter Ackroyd, Christopher Hitchens learns that Newton probably didn’t get bonked on the head by an apple—but he did have some pretty funny ideas about sex, gold, and religion.

Flaws of Gravity