"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" - Henry Ward Beecher

***

My Favourite Periodical:


3rd November:

"In the old East Germany, officials had a list of terms to describe Britons: “paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators.” A Muslim journalist observes: “We worship God by loathing America.”"

"In 2004 girls outnumbered boys at secondary schools in almost half the countries of the world (84 of 171). The number of countries in which the gap between the sexes has more or less disappeared has risen by a fifth since in 1991. At university level, girls do better still, outnumbering boys in 83 of 141 countries. They do so not only in the rich world, which is perhaps not surprising, but also in countries such as Mongolia and Guyana where university education for anyone is not common."
When girls do worse at school than boys and are relatively poorly represented, this is evidence of structural discrimination. When there're more girls than boys in school and they do better, this is called the gap disappearing?!?!

"That is demonstrated by Mr Hamel's latest book, which provides fascinating case studies of firms such as Google, Whole Foods Market and Gore-Tex, but draws no conclusion and finds no common factor other than that none of their innovative founders—Sergey Brin and Larry Page, John Mackey and Bill Gore—went to business school."


10th November:

"Technological pursuits have opportunity costs. Other, perhaps more lucrative, uses can always be found for the resources so expended. That is why no firm in China is betting billions on a risky search for the next blockbuster drug. “If I had even a hundredth of that kind of money,” says Hai Mi of WuXi PharmaTech, a pharmaceutical firm in Shanghai, “I'd rather open a restaurant.”"

"Its elusive chairman, Ren Zhengfei, who still bestrides the company he founded almost 20 years ago, is a veteran of the People's Liberation Army, and his employees, who do boot-camp calisthenics in the morning, subscribe to a “wolf spirit” of winning deals and working like a dog. This, surely, is a company befitting a tech-superpower."

"Haier's repairmen found that rural customers used their washing machines to clean vegetables, as well as clothes. Its response was to widen the drainpipes that might clog with peels."


17th November:

"NO SELF-RESPECTING protest movement leaves home these days without its own colour scheme. Last weekend, tens of thousands of Malaysians wore canary-yellow shirts to defy a government ban and march in Kuala Lumpur, calling for fairer elections."

[On Gaza Strip smuggling] "While he does buy dried milk and drugs, his most popular import is generic Viagra, made in India, which he sells for 75 cents a tablet... They can map the length and direction of the tunnel accurately using satellite pictures from Google Earth."

"And if indeed Proton has identified a new market, its rivals will surely soon be on the scene. As planned, its “Islamic” car will feature a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, a box in which to store a copy of the Koran and a compartment for a headscarf. This, Proton seems to think, is a formula that no other carmaker can match. That seems unlikely."

"In 1903 the artist visited Ravenna, in Italy, where he was struck by the sixth-century Byzantine mosaic interior of the basilica of San Vitale. The glinting gold glass tiles embedded with precious and semi-precious gems must have seemed like a preview of heaven's glory to the parishioners. The Klimt portraits influenced by San Vitale look more like previews of the glories of sex."


24th November:

"“THE forecaster is like an entrepreneur,” says Roman Frydman. “He uses quantitative methods, but he also studies history, and relies on intuition and judgment. He is not a scientist.” According to the New York University economist, this fact has been lost on contemporary economists, who continue to pursue the perfect economic forecast despite abundant evidence that it does not, and cannot, exist. They dismiss their repeated failures in much the same way that self-styled reformers in Mr Frydman's native Poland once insisted that socialism was great, but just needed to be carried out better... Messrs Frydman and Goldberg examine the persistent failure of economists to predict movements in the currency markets. According to Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard who has long attempted to find rational models for predicting currency fluctuations, “it is stunning how hard it is to explain movements in exchange rates.” All the models based on rational expectations now say that, on fundamentals, the euro is overvalued against the dollar, he reckons. But does that mean the dollar will soon rise? Mr Rogoff says he has no idea. In rational-expectations theory, a range of variables including inflation, interest rates and growth should have a predictable impact on currency movements, but in practice this theory has proved less useful for forecasting than tossing a coin. Among rational economists, the debate is over “whether the glass is 5% full or 95% empty,” he says. Only over longer periods—say two to four years—is there any evidence of exchange-rate predictability, which is far too long to be useful to traders or policymakers."

"Those showy roast swans and peacocks of medieval times were all very well, but they were also very stringy, so when turkeys were introduced in the 16th century (at a great price), they soon graced all the best tables... Queen Elizabeth I loved sugary creations so much that by the time she was 65 all her teeth had turned black... When tinned foods first became widely available in the second half of the 19th century, they were seen as a triumph of wholesomeness over the often adulterated, infested and rotten “fresh” food of the day."


December 1st:

"SIR – The rise of religiosity in America has coincided with the movement of the population away from inner cities to the suburbs. People living the relatively isolated “good life” naturally seek engagement with their neighbours, and one of the few mechanisms for regular interaction in the suburbs is the church. Many people attend church for social reasons initially, not to satisfy a spiritual need.

Thomas Naypauer
Cleveland"

"Merit was the test for a modern country, he declared, not “whether you belong to the united union for folding chairs, or whatever”."

"Efforts to staunch the flow have ranged from the ambitious to the ludicrous. Hundreds of concrete balls linked by steel cables were air-dropped into the hole, to no good effect. A group of Javanese mystics, offered a cash reward by local authorities to plug the abyss using supernatural powers, fared no better."

[Obama] “One of the great pleasures of running for president has been, you know, to go to some tiny town in Iowa and you've got some guy in overalls and a seed hat say, ‘What do you think about the situation in Burma?’ You know, and you think he is going to ask you about corn, and he asks you about Burma.”

"In one infamous example, Japan restricted imports of foreign skis, arguing that Japanese snow was different."

"Opposition leaders have been harassed or arrested and their financing blocked. Television has given blanket coverage to United Russia and dished dirt on all opposition. This propaganda has been so effective that, despite United Russia's refusal to participate in TV debates, 8% of viewers believe they have seen it win them."

[On Polish weirdness] "Jaroslaw, as prime minister, unsuccessfully demanded voting rights for his war dead. (Without the second world war, Mr Kaczynski argued in June, Poland would today have an extra 28m people, so should be given the votes of a bigger country.) This nationalistic sally broke all the rules of European Union behaviour, which dictate that the war may be cited only to highlight the miracle of post-war reconciliation... Poland's junior justice minister, Andrzej Duda, reopened the argument at a working lunch. As ministers ate, Mr Duda turned to the Danish justice minister, Lene Espersen, and read out the number of abortions carried out in her country."

[On Nick Griffin and David Irving] "On balance, however, the Oxford Union members who had voted to stage the debate had a better case. Free speech, they argued, is like a muscle which needs to be exercised to remain useful; the extremes of its terrain must be staked out to stop it shrinking. That seems a better attitude than Austria's, which by imprisoning Mr Irving boosted his notoriety (and his appeal to the Oxford Union). It is also preferable to that of the British government, which pursues the impossible goal of protecting the feelings of Muslims, gays and other groups who officially loathe each other... Introducing Mr Irving, the president of the Union described his views as “despicable and abhorrent”, adopting Columbia's “invite and insult” approach. So the Union honoured its avowed commitment to free speech (Harold Macmillan once described it, with perhaps a little hyperbole, as “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”)."


December 8th:

"In my dual capacity as faithful reader of your publication and economic counsellor to the prime minister of Romania, I am appalled by the carnivalesque depiction of my country in recent articles. It seems to me that you like to focus on subjects such as the slaughter of pigs (Charlemagne, November 17th), begging (“Disharmony and tension”, November 10th) and sausages and plum brandy (“Justice for some”, November 3rd), none of which is a particularly strong area of expertise for you. But while you concentrate on imaginary battles between spooks, crooks and idiots, genuinely important economic changes in Romania go unreported."

"Despite a growing defence-procurement scandal, the DPJ has failed to implicate LDP politicians—even Fukushiro Nukaga, now finance minister, to whom scandals usually stick like a faithful dog."

"The improvement prize went to Poland, an also-ran in 2000. That reflects not increased spending, but successful reforms in 1999, which ended the practice of early selection on ability... Poles [are] the poster children for the proposition that early “tracking”—allocating pupils to different sorts of schools or programmes—hurts weak ones without benefiting the rest. “We have learnt that you can really make a change by bringing weaker performers into more demanding streams,” says Barbara Ischinger, the OECD's director of education. "

"Across the world, the less students know about science, the more optimistic they are about the chances of solving the planet's environmental problems."