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Sanity About Security: a Step Forward in New York
Previously in this series here. A reader who works in the main Citibank building in Manhattan writes to report: My office building is the world headquarters of Citibank. In the wake of 9/11 they...
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Wait a Minute: Actually, the Energy Crisis IS Sort of Like Sputnik!
In a dispatch here, with links back to several previous items, I quoted a reader who said that it was a fundamental conceptual error to compare a national push for clean energy with previous all-out...
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"The Cloud" as Hindenberg?
The pithiest single sentence I have heard so far at the Aspen/Atlantic Ideas Festival, underway now (and chronicled in detail by my Atlantic colleagues Conor Friedersdorf and Alexis Madrigal here and...
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(In)sanity About Security: the Saga Goes On
Yesterday I passed along a good-news (in the circumstances) account, from a lawyer who had seen a pointless piece of security theater dismantled in Manhattan. Another lawyer writes with another side...
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Solar Impulse Flies Through the Night!
Given that this news is the lead story on the NYT site right now, it's not exactly secret. But: having chronicled earlier steps in this direction, here and here, I can't resist celebrating the...
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Craig of Craigslist: Building an "Immune System of Democracy"
As far as I can tell, the Aspen Ideas Festival has not yet put up a video of this morning's session on "Is Transparency Critical?" Despite the somewhat opaque topic, I think anyone interested in...
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Let's Not Leap to Conclusions About the Hindenburg!
You learn something every day. Yesterday I mentioned that a tech designer had called the Internet "cloud" a "dirigible filled with hydrogen." Although I didn't use words like "explode" or "blow up," I...
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China Renews Google's License
I mentioned last month that the Chinese government had a choice about whether to intensify its confrontation with Google -- by refusing to accept Google's latest gesture on search-censorship as...
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Security Insanity, Cont.
In dispatches previously here and here, I mentioned one instance of security-theater being ratcheted back, and another of its permanence. Now, two more items reporting modest progress in the "sanity...
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JFK Jr. as Pilot
It will soon be eleven years since the crash off Martha's Vineyard that killed John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister-in-law. In the aviation world, this episode has been seen as a tragedy but...
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Today's Pithy, Cautionary Note on Economic Trends
Just now at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bharat Balasubramanian -- generally addressed as "Dr. Bharat," left -- an engineering executive from Daimler AG in Germany, made an off-hand observation of what...
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Shell Oil Slide Show: How to Drill a Deepwater Well
This will be my last tout of Aspen/Atlantic Ideas Festival sessions. The video is not yet up on the main Aspen archive site, here, but please check in a few days to see if they've posted a July 9...
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The Universal Language of Song
In case you've been meaning to get serious about your Chinese language study, you'll want to consider eChineseLearning.com, whose motto is "Live Teachers from China." (And, as I will never tire of...
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Two Ways of Looking at Shell-vs-BP
I mentioned yesterday that Shell engineers had presented a detailed contrast between their deepwater well design and BP's, which at face value was quite damning of BP. I have been trying to find out...
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In-House Notes
The Atlantic's online world is a constantly growing (and improving!) empire. Because, like Jeff Goldberg, I am only a pretend blogger, doing this as a when-available sideline to "real" reporting and...
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The Thoughts of Dr. Bharat
Over the weekend I mentioned an offhand comment by Bharat Balasubramanian of Germany's Daimler AG -- that's "Dr. Bharat" to you --about the unwholesome effect on America's income distribution of...
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Google, and China's "National Mentality"
I mentioned several days ago that the Chinese government's decision to renew Google's operating license was beneficial for all parties. Good for the company; smart for the Chinese government; and...
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Shell Video on "How to Drill a Well" Now Posted
I've mentioned a couple of times, here and here, that Shell oil officials recently gave a detailed comparison of the way they drill deepwater wells, vs. the way BP did it on the well that failed.The...
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Security Theater Goes World-Wide (Iceland + Palau Dept)
Previous dispatches here, with related links. Story so far: I mentioned an instance of "security theater" being scaled back and asked for other good-news reports. No such luck! The reports that have...
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Back Story on the Chinese Rap Video
This is what the internet is for! It turns out that the campy video on "the increasingly popular Chinese language" that I mentioned recently, featuring the Taiwanese girl-group S.H.E., is so familiar a...
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