I’ve used the CIA World Factbook quite a bit in my research.
I never new the World Factbox has a page about the entire world.
As kottke says, it seems like a primer for aliens passing through the sector.
BTW, how can the planet have an external debt of $12.7 trillion? Do we owe Venusians money?
An Australian comedy show one-ups Talking to Americans with their secret weapon: visual aids.
The Times Online reports that China will now require parents to choose names for their babies from a pre-appoved database of Chinese characters because rare characters don’t appear in computerized character sets.
This was most interesting:
“About 60 million of China’s 1.3 billion people have at least one rare character in their name, making it difficult for them to open a bank account or to buy an aircraft ticket.”
You can understand the programmers’ dilemma here. Which of the language’s estimated 40,000 to 80,000 characters to you include when expressing the language on a computer? It’s not practical to include characters so rare that they don’t even appear in classical Chinese writing, or those that appear in a handful of ancient poems.
It’s difficult to think of an analogy of the situation in English language without going back to the 11th century when letters like “thorn” “wynn” and “yogh” were part of the alphabet and U and J didn’t exist yet.
I was watching the trailer for V for Vendetta and I noticed some of the flags look kinda odd: a fascist version, I suppose, of the English flag with white replaced with black.
I started looking around flag sites to find something similar (I’m a bit of a vexo-geek). The closest I found was the flag of Durham City, using this excellent flag search engine (Currently down: MeFi effect).
In my searches, though, I came across a review of the movie from a conservative blogger, who criticized the movie for demonizing conservatives.
At first, I thought he was being paranoid, but now I see Alan Moore, author of the graphic novel the movie is based on, thinks the film makers missed the mark, too.
He sees the two political extremes being fascism and anarchism, and his book was about the clash of those extremes in a future/alternate Britain.
“This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn’t a mention of anarchy as far as I could see,” said Moore.
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I wrote an article about blogging and the election for the March issue of Policy Options, “Canada’s leading public policy magazine.”
It’s available online in pdf format. It’s kinda weird seeing my writing in a three-column lay-out.
Among the blogs I mention in the article:
Dissonance And Disrespect
The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
Buckets of Grewal
Let It Bleed
Cherniak on Politics
Warren Kinsella
andrewcoyne.com
azerbic
The Blogging Tories
Stephen Taylor
small dead animals
babble
Inkless Wells
Michelle Malkin
Michael Geist
Boing Boing
Why, oh, why did I have to find this gold-plated, diamond-encrusted USB memory stick the day after writing about them for the CBC?
Looks like there’s going to be a Transformers comic book miniseries set during the Industrial Revolution.
As cool as this is, I gotta say, the Autobots are not the brightest when it comes to picking their vehicle forms. Typically, an Autobot is, as the name suggests, a land vehicle, while the Decepticons fly around above them as F-15s or winged bugs or whatever.
In this miniseries, it looks like the Autobots have limited themselves even further by transforming into trains.
“Oh no! Megatron is getting away! Too bad nobody built tracks in that direction…”
There’s nothing like a great curling shot.
Unless it’s a great curling with enthusiastic Japanese commentary.
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