White House deploys Open-Source Drupal

Whitehouse.gov is now Drupal-powered. I commented on this (and Drupal use in libraries) over at the CMS blog.

Squeezing 1TB of data onto a fingernail-size chip

See article in computerworld.com about breakthrough at NCSU: "Engineers create fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB of data", and featured today on slashdot. 

U.S. Industrial Decline (as viewed from Germany)

A thoughtful and poignant (if also left-slanted) essay from the Berliner Umschau, translated by Watching America: "American De-Industrialization Continues Unabated."

This part in particular made me wince: "When word gradually spread that Detroit automobiles were of inferior quality, all three American car manufacturers responded with attempts to inoculate their customers with doses of chauvinism: Buy American! Dealerships were festooned with American flags and banners. This took on a life of its own with auto dealers competing with one another to have the biggest flag. When the foreign journalist mentioned earlier last returned to the United States, he reported seeing a gargantuan American flag flying over a dealership on a 150-foot flagpole. Instead of flying gigantic flags, no one apparently ever came up with the idea of building better cars."

(Note: glancing at the car section of the Consumer Reports Buying Guide for 2008, it's clear the U.S. still trails Japan and Germany on quality and reliability.)

Jung's Red Book to be Published after typed drafts found at Beinecke and Elsewhere

The New York Times Magazine 9/30/09 cover story, “ The Holy Grail of the Unconscious: What the Unearthing of Carl Jung's Red Book is Doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe your Dreams)", recounts how the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology” is now about to be published.

Jung's complete illustrated manuscript had been locked away in a safe deposit box for many years by his heirs. Recently, though, two incomplete and un-illustrated typed drafts of the Red Book were discovered, one at the home of Jung’s transcriptionist's daughter, and the other at Yale’s Beinecke Library "in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher."

In order to prevent selective, unauthorized quotation from the typed drafts, the family decided it was time, 100 years after Jung wrote it, to allow the original mansucript to be scanned and published .

A 1,300-year-old Japanese Hotel

Hōshi Ryokan, featured today on gizmag.com, is the world's oldest hotel and its oldest continuously-operating business, owned and operated by 46 generations of the same family over 1,291 years so far. According to gizmag, it was established by a Buddhist disciple at a hot spring in Komatsu, Japan, after its location was revealed to his master in a dream.