Jinn of Quality and Risk

On September 27, 1066, William landed unopposed at Pevensey and spent the next two weeks pillaging the area and strengthening his position on the beachhead. ... [After the battle of Hastings] the earls and bishops... soon submitted and crowned him William I on Christmas Day 1066. [British Monarchs] 

See PopTech, The Blog 

Insider's guide to Davos: people generally work better in an open environment, so long as there is somewhere they can retreat to when they need quiet. The most inspiring office I ever visited was Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn by Hermann Hertzberger. I can't say there was anything beautiful about the architecture, but the offices felt like a lively, main street in an Italian hill town. The informal conversation and meetings that make for organisational dynamism were integral to the design. 

Six teams of architects from across the globe have been shortlisted in the race to redevelop the site of the former World Trade Center in New York. The competition was re-opened after initial plans were rejected The teams, selected from more than 400 submissions from 34 countries, were chosen to develop new design schemes for the site after initial plans for the site were roundly criticised as being too dull. The choice is very simple: erect Frank Lloyd Wright's mile-high building. 

The USA gives away 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. ... Applicants for Diversity Visas are chosen by a computer-generated random lottery drawing. Entries must be received between 2002-Oct-07 and 2002-Nov-06. The INS has a short explanation of how to participate.

See also last year's Green Card lottery results: Approximately 87,000 applicants have been registered and notified and may now make an application for an immigrant visa. Since it is likely that some of the first 50,000 persons registered will not pursue their cases to visa issuance, registration of a larger number of applicants is intended to ensure that all available DV-2003 numbers will be used... Applicants registered for the DV-2003 program were selected at random from the approximately 6.2 million qualified entries received... An additional 2.5 million applications were either received outside of the mail-in period or were disqualified for failing to properly follow directions. The visas have been apportioned among six geographic regions with a maximum of seven percent available to persons born in any single country.

It would be amusing to compute the relative popularity of the lottery in each country based on number of winners/population (assuming a close-to-perfectly random distribution of winners across countries). 

In Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he coins the term chartjunk to refer to needless visual flourishes that contribute nothing to the effectiveness of an information design in communicating to its audience. These days, our URLs are loaded down with something very similar: long strings of characters that exist only to satisfy some technical constraint, detracting from the effectiveness of our URLs as communication tools. Call it CMSjunk. Even if one must use a CMS that generates user-hostile, machine-oriented URLs, one can always offer alternative, user-friendly ones. 

Malaria has killed hundreds of millions of people in recent decades, because of the anti-scientific DDT scare which Rachel Carson launched in Silent Spring. The continuing DDT ban allows malaria to kill millions every year, mostly children and pregnant women in developing countries.

Now The Seattle Times encourages people to honor Rachel Carson by continuing her fight: Forty years ago ... Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring [which] chronicled the devastating impact that DDT and other toxic pesticides were having on our wildlife. ... Carson's book rocked the nation when it was released, and unquestionably launched the modern environmental movement. In other words they want you to support the annual killing of millions of people in developing countries. Anyone who seeks and knows the facts behind the DDT ban, and its direct consequences, will be horrified. 

Motorola unveiled this week a GPS chip for location pinpointing technology that is small enough to fit into portable electronic products such as cameras, PDAs, and cell phones. Potential applications include displaying real-time maps, supporting navigation (as is already available in some cars), locating a local business (e.g. the closest gas station or coffee shop), and hiking in remote areas (e.g. through desert dunes or jungle forest). Another application will be tracking down stolen property (e.g. cars).