" Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass. [...]

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. [...]

Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views. Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ. The irony is that perspective will not get kids into college, nor does it help them thrive there. Academia rewards depth. Expertise is bred by experts who work with their own kind."

"It's not very big at all. I picked it up - you can pick it up with one hand. Took it out actually on a sidewalk. This device gathered, very passively, less than one watt of power from the environment - I won't say how it was done, I'm not allowed to at this point - and the machine started up. It generated hundreds of watts of power in usable form. We hooked this up ourselves, so there was no mystery about it. We even selected the things to hook up to this thing. It ran a 300-watt light bulb, a 100-watt light bulb, a stereo and an oscillating fan with an electric motor, all at the same time with literally no artificial manmade input of power."

• Drunken frat boy drives country into ditch.
  
• Bush/Cheney: Malice in Blunderland
  
• Who would Jesus bomb?
  
• War begins with 'Dubya'.
  
• Bush is proof that empty warheads can be dangerous.
  
• Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too.
  
• How did our oil get under their sand?
  
• Daddy, can I start the war now?
  
• 1000 points of light and one dim bulb.
  
• Sacrifice our SUV's, not our children.
  
• Preemptive impeachment.
  
• Frodo has failed, Bush has the ring.
  
• Look, I'll pay more for gas!
  

Only two days after Colin Powell made his presentation to the U.N. Security Council, the evidence he provided is unraveling. Through interviews with experts, intelligence sources, and an examination of the physical evidence, reporters are piecing together facts that refute all of his major claims.

" When I think about the times when I have felt most creative, most alive, most energized I think about times when I've connected with other people. A lot of times it's when I've been in a group that is in the zone. That zone is sometimes called high performance, excellence, or high productivity. I bet everyone can think of experiences you've had with groups like this.

I've always been fascinated by the dynamics of these great groups. What is it about the relationships, the context, the environment, the task, the leadership, the facilitation, and all the other factors that makes the difference? What if we could live and work like this more of the time? What can we do as a member of any group we're in to turn up the dial on the energy, passion, and fun? What do people with sponsorship, leadership, and other key roles need to do to create the conditions for these groups to grow and thrive?"

Inherently Bridging Exclusive Quality Proposition Channel

Upwardly Configured Interactive Paradigm Empowerment Option

Operationally Value-Added Movement Differentiation Decision

Business2.com reports that while many corporations have monitoring tools and restrictions on Internet usages for non-work related activities, these can have negative effects on the productivity of the workplace. The report notes that people have to take days off from work to deal with personal business that could have been done in a few minutes or hours from a work net connection, and that employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place. A related study suggests employees spend more time doing work from home than playing at work.

"Two nights ago, Bush's speechwriter was on The Daily Show, the Jon Stewart fake news program that's funny because it blurts out the truth. The speechwriter explained with glee how he came up with the phrase 'Axis of Evil'. He originally wrote 'Axis of Hatred', but his boss (not Bush) took one look at it and said, "No, it's the 'Axis of Evil'", repeating it a few times aloud to see how it sounds.

This constituted the debate over whether these countries actually are evil and the effect classifying them as such would have. A couple of lobes short of The West Wing, eh?"

"...Now, however, George W. Bush has made it clear that all I need to do is run out of patience, and then I can wade in and do whatever I want!"

"Contrary to expectations, urban landscapes are some of the most interesting ecologies. The variety of landscapes and microclimates (roads, parks, gardens, rail, canals, industries), the intense flow of exotic materials for commerce and gardening, and continual disturbance, all contribute towards many opportunities for nature. Due to such variety, cities are often more biologically diverse than the surrounding countryside. Nature is astoundingly creative, and keen to exploit subtle convoluted chance.

Nature continues to happen, in more astounding forms, even within our most artificial environments. Some bizarre relations of humans and nature from The Ecology of Urban Habitats

• The overall result is that urbanized areas, despite a large reduction in the total vegetation cover, support a higher number of species than the surrounding countryside. [p. 11]
• .. tropical fauna and flora occurs in certain canals where water used to cool machinery is discharged. Thermal pollution of the River Don by the steel industry has enabled wild figs to colonize its banks, [p. 118]
• In fact all industry, as it gets tidied up, becomes less interesting for wildlife. The very features that allow a rich flora and fuana to survive - the squalor, rubbish, old buildings and machinery, derelict huts, rotting dumps, ineffiecient handling - are becoming unacceptable to management [p. 122]
• [Oxford ragwort] A native of Southern Italy, was cultivated in the Oxford Botanical Garden for over a hundred years before it eventually escaped (1794) and soon reported as plentiful on almost every wall in the town. About 1879 it reached the Great Western Railway system where the plumed seed engaged in a new form of dispersal, being carried along in the vortex of air behind express trains, or even inside them [p. 139]
• the reasons for caraway being limited to railway verges in Scotland ... caraway cake topped with fresh seeds was pocketed at post-funeral teas ... on the way home they tried to eat it, gave up and threw it out of the window [p. 142]
• A more subtle effect of dogs can be observed on the base of street trees against which they urinate. This area, known as the canine zone, carries a different epiphytic flora to the rest of the trunk. [p. 162]
• Starlings were successfully introduced into New York in 1890-91 as part of a project to establish in the States all the plants and animals mentioned by Shakespeare. [p. 171]
• .. [an] experiment took place in Germany during the Third Reich when exotics [foreign plants] became enemies of the state and for a short time naturalistic planting flourished ... [p. 184]"

On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria.

Biologists Raœl Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil. This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago. Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life.

"Time is that quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working." --Anonymous

"There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done."

"France is no longer the ally it once was... " and he says the U.S. "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance." and how about this one "I have long thought that there were forces in France intent on reducing the American role in the world."

"But in the German case, the behavior of the Chancellor is idiosyncratic. He tried again to incite pacifism, and this time failed in Sunday's elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony. His capacity to do damage is now constrained. Chancellor Schroeder is now in a box, and the Germans will recover their equilibrium."

"What pervasaive meme can we come up with that will be strong enough to counter the powerful theft/piracy images? Let's all blog aloud and get the juices flowing, shall we?

Ownership of physical property implies exclusive use. I own my lawn mower, it's in my posession, in order for you to use it I must relinquish its use to you. You shouldn't loan it to your neighbour in turn without my permission, especially as that extends my inability to make use of it. If you take it from me, I am left without its use altogether. I can ask to be compensated for the loss. I lose a physical entity, and therefore control over its use.

Ownership of intellectual property does not imply exclusive use. You can play my music without depriving me of it. You can loan it to someone else without affecting my use, although you should ask my permission. I never lose my ability to have full use of the work. What I lose when you use my work without my permission or recompense is control over its use.

Obviously these are two very different concepts. Yet they're both called ownership . Concepts of theft and piracy of intellectual property just don't fit. How have such ill-fitting analogies come to permeate our conciousness?"

"Nature has worked well for billions of years by making vast numbers of very small bets. This minimizes the risk that a single bad outcome could inflict. For this reason, our conservative brethren are correct in asserting Big Government is a problem. To the extent that Big Government represents a bet too big that imposes unacceptable risks, it is a problem that demands our attention. The failure of the old Soviet Union comes to mind.

But the riskiness of big bets doesn’t apply just to Big Government. It also applies to Big Business. And that’s the big bet today’s conservatives ask us to make over and over. The conservatives of course don’t call it a big bet. They call it 'privatization' and 'consolidation'. But they can’t have it both ways. If they want bigger and bigger bets on business, then we need government to protect the long term good for all by restraining the worst excesses of unfettered market capitalism with its narrow focus and myopic time scales. If conservatives want smaller government, they will have to agree to smaller businesses."

"Given the nature of communicating online, one person's failure to log on for days, weeks or months at a time can cause concern in the people who continue to log on regularly. It's especially worrisome when the person who isn't signing on was living with a known illness. While "killing" online personas happens all the time, the real tragedy occurs when a real life death happens and is chalked up to a person just not logging on anymore."

AR TOMORROW: RECOGNIZING FACES
Ever forget a face? Augmented reality will help you recover seamlessly when you bump into some-one and can't remember whether she's a college acquaintance or your accountant's ex-wife. Your AR system will automati-cally search a personalized face-recognition database, then provide text that tells you not only the name of the person you're looking at, but some key personal details as well.

"I'm angry that congressmen for the last 30 years haven't fully funded space exploration. The Columbia should have been bringing back tourists from the moon, settlers from Mars. And this wouldn't have been the 28th mission but the 1000th."