How cool is this?

From National Geographic, but if you like this, check out NASA's picture of the day, which you can subscribe to.

Another Top 100 List

This time it's 100 things to watch for 2010, mostly marketing and business trends:

3. Alternative Measures of Prosperity
France’s Joie de Vivre Index, initiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to provide a better assessment of well-being than the classic measure of economic health, the GDP. Look for more countries or companies to embrace alternative measures of prosperity, such as the Triple Bottom Line of people, profits and planet.

4. Alternative Metals in Jewelry
With gold prices volatile in recent years, Asian jewelry makers are turning instead to precious metals like palladium and titanium. China’s imports of palladium have been rising steadily; look for more jewelry manufacturers to choose it over gold.

5. Bacon Everywhere
Bacon is being spotted in everything from cocktails (made with bacon-infused liquor or the new Bakon Vodka) to desserts, including bacon-and-egg ice cream at the famous Fat Duck in the U.K., a bacon chocolate bar from Vosges Haut-Chocolat and Lollyphile’s maple-bacon lollipop.

#5 is right on - I was given a bacon dark chocolate bar as part of a Christmas present. Haven't quite had the nerve to taste it yet, though.

New Year reminder

A week into the new year, it's good to be reminded of the opportunity before us (you can mentally substitute "person" for "man" in the following quote - I did):

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man.
-Benjamin Franklin

Yemen

I've always been attracted to the pictures I've seen of Yemeni cities, like this one from foreignpolicy.com. The underpants bomber got his training here and it is one of the poorest and least literate countries in the Arab world. A 2007 figure for unemployment in Yemen was 40%!

The largest Yemeni population in the US is around Detroit. Strange that that was the underpants bomber's target.

100 Global Thinkers

Foreign Policy magazine has come up with its first ever list of the top 100 Global Thinkers. The first two are Bernanke and Obama, which is perhaps predictable. The third one is a name I've never heard before! Zahra Rahnavard. Who is that? She is the wife of Iranian opposition leader Mousavi and was the brains behind his campaign and the Green Revolution. The governor of the People's Bank of China comes in at #9, and the editor of Wired magazine at #24.

I encourage you to check out this list. It's very interesting.

Green Wall

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand.

The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said earlier this month at the UN's Copenhagen climate conference...


Trees are almost always formidable foes against encroaching deserts, said Patrick Gonzalez of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Forestry.

That's because stands of trees act as natural windbreaks against sandstorms, and their roots improve soil health—especially by preventing erosion. ...

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo first proposed the idea of a desert-blocking wall in 2005, and it was approved by the African Union in 2007.

All 11 countries that would house the Great Green Wall have pledged to help fund the project.

But the wall has been slow to break ground: Of the 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) it needs to cover, only about 326 miles (525 kilometers) have been planted so far, all within Senegal.

In Copenhagen, President Wade emphasized that he has made the wall a priority, and he has already asked scientists working on the project to choose species hardy enough to survive in arid conditions without maintenance. ..

More than 70 percent of Africa's poor depends on farming, according to the IPCC.

But drought, desertification, and other climate-related disasters are forcing many farmers to abandon their lands, spurring a heavier flow of immigrants out of central and North Africa.

The 9.3-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) wall of trees would improve the surrounding, now-degraded soils, allowing farmers to again grow crops and more easily raise livestock in the region.

Senegal also plans to dig rainwater reservoirs along its portion of the wall—virtual lifesavers in a region where rain falls only three months out of the year, supporters say....

The gigantic tree barrier would also trap some atmospheric carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, and produce a refuge for native animals and plants.

Some of the trees themselves may become valuable crops.

The native acacia senegal tree, which is to be a staple plant in the Great Green Wall, produces gum arabic, a main ingredient in consumer products such as cosmetics and soft drinks.

Farmers could collect the sap and even sustainably harvest some of the wood to make tools or produce charcoal, Senegalese environment advisor Djeng said.

A solution to many problems at once. I love these. [nationalgeographic.com]

Music

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan

Poverty & Unemployment in Afghanistan

A poll was taken in Afghanistan by Oxfam asking Afghans the cause of the conflict in their country. Here are the results:

I went to a talk a few days ago by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute who said that the strongest risk factor for a failed state is the rate of unemployment, especially among young men. Check out his new book: Plan B 4.0, which you can even download for free.

Fun with Leaves

On a lighter note, check out these fantastic pics on NYTimes.com.

The rise and fall of the US vis a vis China

Check out the relative proportions of world GDP for China and the US over time, especially the first one from 1820. I had no idea. [ft.com]

The rest of the article fleshes out the implications:

As US president Barack Obama begins a tour of Asian capitals, the standard assumption in the west is that his meetings will be with leaders of nations that rank as America’s junior partners. Yet the reality is more complex. Amid the rubble of the financial crisis, the US position as singular superpower and global economic top dog looks increasingly under threat.

Those who take pleasure in America’s discomfort point out that this global economic colossus has become shackled to the world’s largest pile of international debt and pulled down by a sinking currency. By common consent China is the chief beneficiary of the financial debacle and a serious challenger to US hegemony.In particular, when he reaches Beijing next week, nothing will be able to disguise the fact that Mr Obama is paying a visit to his country’s biggest creditor.

Since economic might so often goes hand in hand with military strength, this shift in economic power, along with the recent weakness of the dollar, has been heralded as a harbinger of US national decline.

How we live

Check out this very interesting photo essay on ForeignPolicy.com:

In 2008, the number of people living in cities for the first time exceeded those in rural areas worldwide, a historic turning point. One-third of urban dwellers, approximately 1 billion people, live in slums. The United Nations predicts that number will double in the next 25 years....

"No matter what economic condition people are living in, not only do we need to create shelter over our head, but to create a home."

Why won't Obama go?

Perhaps Obama is wavering on going to Copenhagen for the climate talks so that he doesn't further alienate the Republicans he wants support from on the Health Care issue. Thoughts?

For the past two years, 192 countries have participated in talks on the pressing issue of climate change, which will culminate in the Copenhagen summit next month. So far, more than 40 heads of state have agreed to attend, to act as negotiators and more importantly to demonstrate a firm commitment to ambitious targets. The growing list includes Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

But the RSVPs seem lost in the mail for the leaders of the countries considered to be the lynchpins of the deal -- China, the United States, and India. Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh haven't committed yet -- and they should. This summer, Obama indicated he would not attend because Congress has not yet passed climate change legislation. He's since waffled a bit, saying he would if his appearance would close the deal. It's weak tea, and those calling for him to attend include Al Gore and Brazil's da Silva, who used his weekly radio address to implore Obama and Hu to make the trip.

It is less likely that Hu or Singh will attend. Their developing countries have been good negotiators, but reticent to commit to ambitious targets. (China recently called for keeping the Kyoto protocol instead.) If Obama commits, though, they would be a lot more willing -- and that should be reason for the U.S. leader to consider heading across the pond.

In other climate news, the International Energy Agency released its full World Energy Outlook yesterday. One choice doomsday passage:

For every year that passes, the window for action on emissions over a given period becomes narrower -- and the costs of transforming the energy sector increase. We calculate that each year of delay before moving onto the emissions path consistent with a 2°C temperature increase would add approximately $500 billion to the global incremental investment cost...A delay of just a few years would probably render that goal completely out of reach.

Deforestation slowing in Brazil

The number of acres cut in the Amazon this year are the lowest since the government started tracking it in 1988. If you want to take a cynical view, though, it is for the same reason the US has had a major reduction in green house gas emissions in the past year: macro-economic forces. This news is also a bit like unemployment in the US: it's getting worse more slowly.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped nearly 46 percent from August 2008 to July 2009 — the biggest annual decline in two decades, the government said Thursday.

Analysis of satellite imagery by the National Institute for Space Research shows an estimated 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) of forest were cleared during the 12-month period, the lowest rate since the government started monitoring deforestation in 1988.

"The new deforestation data represents an extraordinary and significant reduction for Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvasaid in a statement.

The numbers have been falling since 2004, when they reached a peak of 27,000 square kilometers (10,425 square miles) cleared in one year, according to the space research institute.

The government credited its aggressive monitoring and enforcement measures for the drop, as well as its promotion of sustainable activities in the Amazon region, an area in northern Brazil the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River.

But Paulo Gustavo, environmental policy director of Conservation International, said a major factor is the drop in world prices for beef, soy and other products that drive people to clear land for agriculture in the rainforest.

"The police control has improved a little, there has been success in controlling deforestation," Gustavo said. "But the main factor is the drop in commodity prices, which are the main factor in speeding up or slowing deforestation." [news.yahoo.com]

Just what the world needs...

Venezuela and Russia say they are working on a series of agreements for Moscow to provide the South American country with technology for the development of industries ranging from robotics to biochemistry.

Venezuela's science and technology minister, Jesse Chacon, says the agreements will likely be signed next year.

Russian authorities have presented more than 5,000 technological projects for Venezuela's consideration.

Chacon says the transfer of nuclear technology is not among the projects that were presented at a forum in Venezuela's capital Monday — even through Russia plans to help Venezuela develop nuclear energy to produce electricity. [news.yahoo.com]

Fort Hood

“When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad." [NYTimes.com]

Non-proliferation, Rogue States aren't the Problem

But there's just one problem: The United States is looking for nukes in all the wrong places. Nuclear terrorism won't come from countries; it will come from vast networks of operatives with only tenuous links to states. Nor are terrorists likely to get their nuclear material from rogue regimes. Far more probable is that they will steal it or obtain it through the growing global black market. If this is to be prevented, the United States and its allies will have to give their counterproliferation mindset a sweeping overhaul.

Today's terrorist threats are far less tangible than the traditional, state-centric security ones embodied by such countries as Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel. Rather than diplomatic channels, terrorist networks use advanced information technology to advance their ideology, goals, and missions. They are bound by none of the norms and restraints of states. [ForeginPolicy.com]

Is Ahmadinejad Jewish?

Whether the rumors are true or not, they will impact Ahmadinejad's stance on the Middle East. FP.com suggests he'll have to remain hardline or become even more anti-Israel in order to demonstrate that his family background is as he says it is.

But in the end, the rumor is almost as powerful as the truth when it comes to shaping Ahmadinejad's actions at home and abroad. None of the accounts suggest he had any active participation in the choices allegedly made by his parents while he was still a child. Yet even suggestions of not having been Shiite for many generations -- despite his mother's family claiming descent from Islam's prophet Muhammad -- undercuts Ahmadinejad's legitimacy in the eyes of many conservative Iranians.

Ultimately, on the domestic front in Iran, the whole issue plays into the widening chasm between the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, some of whom have challenged his family's Muslim lineage and piety for years. His oft-questioned background also may explain why he and the many relatives he appointed to high office are working hard to create a secular yet still autocratic state, moving away from the theocratic oversight of politics.

On the international front, the problem of Ahmadinejad's past produces other complications. As his heritage becomes a more public question, it only makes it less likely that he can find accommodation with Israel without compromising himself in Muslim eyes. To protect and further his political career, Ahmadinejad will only be more compelled to reaffirm his Shiite identity by presenting himself as the champion of Muslim and Palestinian rights over Jewish and Israeli ones.

Consequently, Ahmadinejad's Jewish background, if it does exist, will only make peace in the Middle East and compromise with the United States less likely on his part. And in endeavoring to deflect and vitiate complications -- actual or imaginary -- from his past, the Iranian president continues to sully his nation's image and tarnish his own legacy.

Yes, we currently subsidize fossil fuels!

This seems like a no-brainer. How did this not happen sooner?

Group of 20 leaders are close to an agreement on phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels in an effort to curb global warming, though no fixed dates have been set, reports Reuters.

Several G20 countries subsidize fuel such as coal and oil, at a cost of about $300 billion, to keep prices artificially low for consumers, which boosts both demand for hydrocarbons and emissions, reports Reuters.

Obama aide Michael Froman told Reuters that phasing out fossil fuel subsidies worldwide could cut greenhouse gases by up to 12 percent by 2050, citing estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency. He said United States would agree to the cuts as well.

Ever wonder what Swedes do during those long winters?

STOCKHOLM – “I saw a wonderful statue earlier. I always knew it was there, but today I measured it and soon we’ll knit a sweater for it. We’ll meet up on site to stitch it and take a picture for our blog.”

Maskan (“the stitch”), one of three code-named female founders of the Stockholm “guerrilla knitting” group, Stickkontakt, is telling me about their upcoming knitting graffiti action. Inspired by the Houston group, Knitta Please, Stickkontakt decorate everything from lampposts and bins to park benches and tree trunks with colorful yarns. “We often have political messages,” Maskan tells me. “But sometimes we don’t. Once, we decided to celebrate Sweden’s few female statues by dressing up four of them as super heroines.”

There is a zero tolerance policy for graffiti in Stockholm; any unauthorized street art must be removed within 24 hours. But that hasn’t dissuaded guerrilla knitters.

“We’re hoping that our actions – which can hardly be called vandalism – will serve as a kind of gateway to making people more open to street art in general,” says Maria, cofounder of another knitting graffiti group called Masquerade.

Maria and her friend Lina, the other cofounder of Masquerade, see knitting graffiti as fun, harmless, quirky, and soft, with the potential for a global impact. In fact, they recently returned from a trip where they used knitting graffiti to “tag” along the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia, Mongolia, and China. [csmonitor.com]

Crowd-sourcing

You know that I'm a foodie and this article would have appealed to me anyway, but the thing that really caught my attention is the word "crowd-sourcing". I guess that's the verb for how a wiki is created. I would say that evolutionary improvement can be made through the "crowd-sourcing" of a recipe, but that's not the way to make revolutionary steps or to produce real novelty or innovation. So, what do you think of the word? And what do you think of the process it describes?

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.

The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes. [NYTimes.com]

happy birthday to me!

Norman Borlaug - Father of the Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug, who revolutionized agriculture, increasing crop yields to feed millions of people died last week. As the world continues to confront expanding populations and increasing environmental degradation, what will be the next wave of agricultural innovation?

Here's a bit of his obituary from Economist.com:

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”.

Crop diseases drew his attention first, inspiring him to turn from forestry to plant pathology under Charles Stakman, a lifelong mentor, at the University of Minnesota. Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right. Rust had devastated the Midwest in the 1930s, and Mexico shortly before he went there. So Mr Borlaug first bred wheat cultivars for rust-resistance, a ten-year task, and then crossed them with Norin, a dwarf Japanese variety, to produce a shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which, when properly charged with water and fertiliser, gave three times the yield.

This was the wheat that swept India in its “Green Revolution”, raising yields from 12m tonnes in 1965 to 20m by 1970, causing the country to run out of jute bags to carry it, carts and railcars to transport it, and places to store it; that made Pakistan self-sufficient in wheat by 1968; that almost doubled yields even in Sudan, on the edge of the Sahel. The famines and huge mortality that had been predicted for the second half of the 20th century never came to pass. More food led not to more births, but fewer, as the better-fed had smaller families. Global grain production outpaced population growth, and Mr Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Greens attacked him, saying his new varieties used too much water and costly chemical fertiliser; his link with DuPont was noted. They complained that traditional farming was disrupted and diversity replaced by monoculture. Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread.

Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved. The gene for rust-resistance in rice, for example, might be put into all other cereals. He hoped he might live to see it.

Meanwhile what he called the “Population Monster” was breathing down his neck, or rather ticking, like Captain Hook’s crocodile. Every second brought two more people, crying to be fed. By 2050, he wrote in 2005, the world would need to double its food supply. Some 800m were malnourished as it was. Mr Borlaug loved to talk of reaching for the stars, but his day-to-day motto was an earthly one. Get the plough. Start growing now.

What do France and Bhutan have in common?

From ForeignPolicy.com. What do you think? Is it valid, good or reasonable to measure Gross National Happiness? Well-Being per Capita?

Nicolas Sarkozy's government is rolling out a "revolutionary" new economic indicator:

France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, beckoning other countries to join in a "revolution" in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis. [...]

France — whose growth has lagged its peers in recent decades according to standard measures — will also try to convince other governments to change their economic tracking, Sarkozy said

"A great revolution is waiting for us," he said. "For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."

"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.

One minor quibble: Sarkozy should really give some credit to King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan, the true pioneer of gross national happiness.

Skeptics can (and will) look at this new innovation as a ploy for France to "juke the stats," since its short workweek and social benefits look a lot more impressive than its GDP growth.

That aside, the transformation of Sarkozy's economic message has been pretty astounding. The president came to power promising privitization and economic modernization and was lambasted by French left-wingers for his attachment to "Anglo-Saxon" economic models. But since the economic crisis (and his own popularity crisis) he's made a habit of attacking the Anglo-Saxons for their free-market orthodoxy and consulting with market-skeptics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz on new economic indicators.

Where have you gone, Sarko l'Américain?

Health care vs. Free trade?

Here's a trade-off that will not be good for us. From Economist.com:

ALTHOUGH Barack Obama alarmed free traders last year with protectionist-sounding pronouncements on the campaign trail, such as one about the need to renegotiate NAFTA, optimists among them dismissed this as mere posturing designed to placate restive trade unions. Yet a decision by the White House to impose punitive tariffs (35% for the first year, falling by five percentage points a year, to 25% in the third year) on Chinese-made pneumatic tyres now raises serious doubts about Mr Obama’s commitment to free trade...

Simon Evenett, a trade economist at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, argues that Mr Obama’s decision is a clear affirmation of the power of American labour unions in shaping its trade policy. It appears that Mr Obama is desperate to shore-up support from unions and the left of the Democratic Party for health-care reform—his most pressing domestic concern—and is prepared to risk repercussions on trade.

If so, heightened economic tensions between America and China are a heavy price to pay. Mr Prasad says that “an escalating trade war between these two large economies has the potential to disrupt the world trading system”. The China-America spat also comes soon before the leaders of the G20, the group of big rich and emerging economies, meet in Pittsburgh on September 24th. Global co-operation has been crucial amid efforts to encourage economic recovery. It would be a tragedy if it that were derailed by posturing over tyres and chicken.

Einstein Quote of the Day

I've always held a special place in my heart for math, and this quote sums it up:

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.