Jinn of Quality and Risk

Very interesting essay on the tides of power in Europe and America (long). Robert Kagan: Today's transatlantic problem... is a power problem. American military strength has produced a propensity to use that strength. Europe's military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior. [via Den Beste] 

Insightful perspective on the widening space between the USA and Europe. The essay is long, but filled with facts and excellent analysis. I wish European intellectuals would read and comprehend this, before it's too late. Karl Zinsmeister: This simple reality needs to be faced squarely by Americans: In a great variety of areas--foreign policy, demography, religion, economics--Americans and Europeans are growing apart. While the September 11 attacks deepened American sobriety, patriotic feeling, and national resolution, in Europe they merely created one more flashpoint for division. ... Some Europeans complain that the U.S. is more and more heading off on its own without them. They are right. ... The philosophical differences between Europe and the U.S. are reflected and magnified in three critical structural breaks: 1) Europe has surrendered much of its economic dynamism. 2) Europe has lost its stomach for military action, substituting an exaggerated confidence in diplomacy. And, 3) Europe is on a path to population collapse. First economics. We have conventionally thought of Europe as having about the same standard of living as Americans. This is less and less true. For the European Union as a whole, GDP per capita is presently less than two thirds of U.S. levels. 

Nicely designed, original, and useful. The 2002 Perl Advent Calendar is an online advent calendar that features a different Perl module each day for the twenty four days of advent, and an extra module on Christmas day. 

The reed boats still being built today by the Indians of Lake Titicaca in the Andes are identical in form and construction to those that sailed the Nile in 2500 BC. But it is another type of boat that survives on the Nile, the felucca, lateen-rigged unlike the royal barges of the Pharaohs which used square sails. "Lateen" is the Anglicized form of the French "latine" — "voile latine" i.e. Latin sail, which was the chief form of rig in the Mediterranean while Vikings were using square sails. It is a certain kind of triangular sail, having a long yard by which it is suspended to the mast. A "lateener" is a vessel rigged with a lateen sail and yard. This rig was formerly much used, and is still the typical sail of the felucca of the Mediterranean, and the dhow of the Arabian Sea. 

ELLEgirlBuddy is an IM-based intelligent agent. Launched in February 2002, it is reported to have made a major impact. Within the first month, traffic to the ELLEgirl Website increased 83%. Within six weeks, subscriptions to the magazine increased significantly.

ELLEgirl, because of its teen female readership, identified IM as a high priority channel for promotion for the new magazine and Web site. Since IM is well entrenched in the target demographic, ELLEgirl chose to do more than advertise in IM and elected to extend the brand into IM with an interactive agent. ELLEgirlBuddy sports the persona of a 16 year old girl. She has two missions: 1) deliver content from both ELLEgirl magazine and ELLEgirl.com including beauty and fashion information; and 2) to engage users in ways that are important to the target demographic. [Instant Messaging Planet]

While designing an e-business solution for a client in 1998, I suggested a similar use of "bots" for customer service, based on an existing Perl-based agent that could listen to "chat" channels, record questions and answers, and automatically provide answers when it recognized a frequently asked question (I believe it was infobot).