Where have all the correspondents gone?

And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here.

From Abroad, Writing the Unspeakable

He's the mascot of the Canadian ethanol industry, promoting good will for corn-based fuel by attending events and handing out balloons and other goodies. But he was unceremoniously thrown out (on his ear) at Canada Day festivities in Ottawa last year, reportedly at the behest of Shell Canada, which had paid to be an exclusive sponsor.

Oh, Canada!

Who’s this 'Corn Cob Bob' guy?

Contracts are being canceled, deals are drying up, prices are starting to drop. The psychology is shifting even as thousands of new homes and condos join the for-sale listings each day - so the downward pressure will only get worse.

Speculators who bought overpriced condos in hope of a quick killing are going to get hosed.

Welcome to the dead zone

Speed kills. That used to refer to the dangers of driving too fast, and sometimes to the drug. Now it more ominously refers to the unhealthy pace at which we live our lives, coerced by rampaging technology into cramming as much as possible into our waking hours. This isn't good for an individual's well-being. But even if you're indifferent to everyone's need for a little wa, the bean counter in you should appreciate this: It's also counterproductive.

Wired News: A Sour Note on Modern Times

Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

Colbert made jokes about Bush's approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush's intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. "We're not some brainiacs on nerd patrol," he said. Boy, that's funny.

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country.

He failed dismally in the funny person's most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate -- to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others. In this sense, he was a man for our times.

He also wasn't funny.

I can't say I laughed much, either.

I often find the Report mildly entertaining, but comparisons of this speech to Jon Stewart's Crossfire rant are undeserved for a variety of reasons.

If it's satire you really want, my friend, you know where to get it.

"You can't fight here! This is the war room!"

So Not Funny

Welcome to the first stock exchange on headline news!

On Trendio.com, you can bet on the popularity of politicians, sporting teams or events, ideas, stars, natural catastrophies, etc., in fact on any word that makes the headlines. The words are rated according to the number of times they appear in 3000 anglophone media web sites from around the world. Buy the words you believe in, sell the others!

Trendio.com - The first stock exchange on headline news

What favored the evolution of such distinctive brainpower in humans or, more precisely, in our hominid ancestors? One approach to answering this question is to examine the factors that might have shaped other creatures that show high intelligence and to see whether the same forces might have operated in our forebears. Several birds and nonhuman mammals, for instance, are much better problem solvers than others: elephants, dolphins, parrots, crows. But research into our close relatives, the great apes, is surely likely to be illuminating.

Scholars have proposed many explanations for the evolution of intelligence in primates, the lineage to which humans and apes belong (along with monkeys, lemurs and lorises). Over the past 13 years, though, my group's studies of orangutans have unexpectedly turned up a new explanation that we think goes quite far in answering the question.

Scientific American: Why Are Some Animals So Smart?

Anyone who has clicked the popular button that commands a spreadsheet computer program to make a chart has experienced the satisfaction of seeing a confusing grid of numbers resolve into crisp bars. It is hard now to imagine how we ever got by without visual tools for understanding masses of data. But of course such devices as the bar graph, the time-series line graph and the pie chart had to be invented. The peculiar man who came up with all three was William Playfair (1759-1823), a Scot who was convinced he could influence Britain's course with visual explanations of macroeconomic trends. Endowed with drafting experience and confident in the power of graphical language, he presented his polemics in a new form: annotated graphs that vividly highlighted trade gaps and the growing national debt.

Although Edward Tufte (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1983]) and others have noted Playfair's role as the leading originator of modern statistical graphics, access to his work has heretofore been limited. Finally Playfair can speak for himself: Facsimiles of two of his most important works—the 1801 edition of The Commercial and Political Atlas, and The Statistical Breviary of the same year—have now been published in one small, affordable volume.

American Scientist Online - A Visionary and a Scoundrel

Few Western academics would aspire to teach political theory in an authoritarian setting. Surely the free, uninhibited flow of discussion is crucial to our enterprise. When I tell my Western friends that I gave up a tenured, high-paying job in relatively free Hong Kong for a contractual post at Tsinghua University in Beijing, they think I’ve gone off my rocker. I explain that it’s a unique opportunity for me: it’s the first time Tsinghua has hired a foreigner in the humanities since the revolution; Tsinghua trains much of China’s political elite, and I might be able to make a difference by teaching that elite; the students are talented, curious, hardworking, and it’s a pleasure to engage with them; the political future of China is wide open, and I’ll be well placed to observe the changes when they happen. Still, I do not deny that teaching political theory in China has been challenging. This has to do partly with political constraints. But it’s not all about politics. Even if China became a Western-style liberal democracy overnight, there would still be cultural obstacles to deal with. In this essay, I will discuss some of these political and cultural challenges.

Teaching Political Theory in Beijing, by Daniel Bell

It is a measure of how all-consuming the Bush Administration's quest to transform the Middle East is that this week's visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao will be denied the spotlight it deserves. While Afghanistan smolders, Iraq burns and Iran shuffles into America's cross-hairs, only a handful of constituencies understand or seem to care that Washington's relationship with Beijing is vulnerable to manipulation by the Pentagon.

China's Internal Crisis