although I swear I had heard about this from someone else beforehand… “the motorcycle-nut daughter of a nuclear physicist in kiev rides around chernobyl with a radiation meter and her camera“

If I was Apple, I would be all over Windows [app] piracy. While Apple has done a fair job convincing people that you can do anything on a Mac that you can do on Windows (ahem. Whether this is a benefit or not depends on your point of view…), but that’s not the biggest roadblock to people “switching”. The barrier is the cost to repurchase software on the Mac platform, which wouldn’t be such an issue if so many people simply don’t pay for the software that they use on Windows. If you paid zero for your copy of Office 2003 or whatever (not me, I’m still on 2000), then paying several hundred dollars for the Mac version (of that, and every other major app you use) is a significant barrier. Ergo: if it was harder to pirate Windows software, more people would buy Macs.

Job notice – Assoc Planner with municipal/urban planning background to assist Town Planner with development and land use matters. Applications accepted until 4/30/04. Send cover letter, resume (work experience, salary history), copy of college degrees and transcripts, list of 5 professional references:

Town of Normal Human Resource Dept
Normal, IL

We were also talking about noise. Frankly, I think we’re all suffering from severe sensory overload. Watching TV for more than 30 minutes or so feels like someone is ringing a bell in my face. As usual, the popular press offers a timely morsel on the matter. Definitely something to pay attention to from a design point of view.

PS — be sure to check out the fantastic public domain orbital images at Earth Observatory — great stuff, brought to you by science.

Des and I were discussing Jared Diamond’s book the other night, and neither of us could remember the author’s exact argument… Good thing, because he happened to be in town giving a lecure last night. The summary is that the “Guns, Germs and Steel” of old-world (esp. European) civilizations that led to capitalism, democracy, etc was (as conventional wisdom holds) due to agriculture emerging earlier and more strongly. But why did agriculture emerge earlier in some places than others? Diamond’s answer is that it was due to an unequal concentration of domesticable plants and animals — essentially, geographic determinism. He doesn’t address what that distribution owes itself to — that is, why are some plants and animals more domesticable and why were they concentrated in certain places… (would have been a good question…). He also thinks that the geographic orientation of Eurasia (East-West) vs. the Americas (North-South) played a role, in that the spread of agriculture and technolgy is less inhibited by climate and geography when moving east-west along lines of latitiude vs. north-south across latitudes.

Someone asked then if Eurasia had an advantage, why did Europe rise above China, which had a lead early on. His answer was that China suffered from what could be regarded as diseconomies of political scale — a single decision made by the emperor could stifle innovation or exploration for the entire Chinese empire, while no single European ruler could control more than a fragment of the population. Balkanization –> competition –> innovation vs. Empire builiding –> control –> stagnation. Many of us have witnessed this first hand of course — most companies become more efficient but less innovative as they grow.

I was hoping that he’d contrast his position with that of De Soto, whose says that the lack of formal property rights (vs. pre-existing geographic conditions) is that is the biggest barrier to wealth generation.