Random Thursday links

Because in Jordan, Friday is Sunday, so Thursday is Friday.

Olli is a Brit who used to live in Albania, but has recently moved to Munich, and is blogging about expat life in Germany.  I especially liked this post.

I encountered the following factoid the other day: 

"...on average, at age 5 we engage in creative tasks 98 times a day, laugh 113 times, and ask 65 questions.

By age forty-four, the numbers fade to 2 creative tasks a day, 11 laughs, and 6 questions."

Well, that's kind of depressing, if true.  On one hand, I really wonder who measured this, and how.  On the other, considering myself and my kids... um, maybe. 

And while I'm being mildly depressed by stuff on the Internet, here's an article that asks if google is making us stupid.  (If so, then I'm in big trouble.)  Also, I'm a few months late for this, but eBay has had to get rid of their old, democratic feedback system because people suck.

Is it all bad?  No.  Police just arrested a wanted war criminal outside of Belgrade.  The body of a man of Arab descent has been discovered in a burial site in Roman-era Denmark  (via Carlos). And finally, there's most awesome nerd post of the week, possibly the year. 

Friday!  Um, Thursday.  What've you got?

Comments

[Doug (not Muir)]

Ok, I've obviously been out of circulation too long. Who's on the posters for LE, NE and CN?

I've got a couple of things: One cribbed from Bruce Sterling, http://tesselion.wordpress.com/
Adaptive Quadrilateral Flat Panelization (who could resist a name like that?), and an obvious labor of love, http://www.fugue.com/pics/goodnews.html
Google Good News.

Any more URLs will probably put this comment into the moderation queue, so I'll stop there.

[Andrew R.]

Regarding the Atlantic article, I can imagine that a thirteenth-century equivalent would ask, "Are pagination, indices, and the summa making us stupid?" There would be much hand-wringing over a change from meditative to consultive reading, from the fact that whereas people had once committed texts to memory, they now merely searched them with this new technology of page numbering, chapter headings, indices, and tables of contents.

[olli]

Hi. Thanks for the mention.

I eventually managed to choke down all the decaf stuff and I'm back on the real thing now.

[Dennis Brennan]

http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385

Did the Romans invent D&D?