(reposted from my blog)

Apple announced last week that it wants to change the way textbooks work for US schools: Instead of schools buying books that are given to a succession of pupils, each kid should receive its own copy of the textbook as an ebook on his iPad.

So far, so interesting. I have two observations on this:

While reading an article by Joseph Stiglitz, I noticed the following factoid about the Iraq+Afpac wars:

But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

This sounds incredibly high.

So: what is the consensus (ha!) of this esteemed community? Is this even remotely plausible?

While reading http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02wed1.html

After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel — with Egypt’s help — imposed a blockade on many goods and most people going into and out of the territory. The goal was to quickly turn residents against their new government. Three years later, Hamas is still in charge — and the blockade has become an excuse for any and all of the government’s failures.

I had to think of Cuba and the US embargo.

As the local resident Austrian I have to comment.

First of all, the name is stupid.

then the second big upset in a week will net the US soccer team the confed-cup trophy.

Over the last years, we heard a steady stream of Republican accusations that the Dem were rooting for failure in Iraq. "They're backstabbing the troops", "The want Bush to fail, and don't care if we all lose the war." and so forth.

Now the tide has turned: The Republicans are wary of the big project the current, democratic, President is proposing. Instead of pouring billions into a (potentially doomed) project in Iraq, now there is a proposal to pour billions into a (potentially wasteful and unnecessary) economic stimulus in order to protect America from the next big threat.

Given all the troubles in the financial sector where credit getting hard to get by, who expected that people running a constant deficit on their karma account also got in trouble?

I just got an interesting email: RIPE NCC got an ENUM delegation request for Taiwan which contained the following info:

Now this is interesting. The ITU is based on consensus. For decades, Taiwan used +886 without official sanction from the ITU. It seems like now China has agreed to the 'Taiwan,China' designation for Taiwan.

hmmmmmm.

I stumbled on an article about Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan" recently. Quick summary: It's very easy to make mistakes when applying the mathematical theory of statistics to the real world. Not everything in the world can be described as independent random variables with clearly defined properties.

So whenever you put real money behind your statistical reasoning, you better be really sure that your calculations are correct and that all the preconditions regarding applicability of the theory are met.

http://gallery.lendl.priv.at/main.php?g2_itemId=49270

#1 is 16 months old. The next year will be "interesting".