Foreign troops suffered their highest death toll in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, and with thousands more troops scheduled to be deployed, this year could be even worse.
Nearly 270 foreign soldiers, 127 of them Americans, were killed in combat in 2008, versus 169 foreign combat deaths in 2007, according to figures compiled by Reuters.
Hundreds more foreign soldiers were wounded in Taliban attacks last year, mostly involving roadside bomb blasts, which according to the U.S. ambassador, doubled to some 2,000 in 2008 from the previous year.
MonthJanuary 2009
Dan Hill provides an excellent summary of The Black Swan and includes a few excepts specifically useful to designers and urban planners.
This is a book that I almost didn’t read. Like The Long Tail or Here Comes Everybody, for instance. Both books I own but don’t feel the need to read, feeling that I’ve already having experienced much of what lies inside. This betrays my own arrogance I suppose, and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed a few profound insights this way. But given the choice I prefer to read about things I don’t know, books that don’t promise to back up my existing ideas. Then there are those like Gladwell’s Blink or The Tipping Point, books whose title more or less says it all. A quick rifle through the pages of these books in an airport bookshop – in that peculiar pre-flight mode of having no time and time on your hands – is enough to get the gist, and speculate as to their point.
The Black Swan almost fell into this category, but a recommendation by Paul Schütze and a few others meant that I did pick it up – at Melbourne Airport, ironically – and consumed it voraciously.
It’s not so much a popular science book as a popular statistics book, not a genre I would’ve thought probable to emerge, and thus something of a black swan in itself.
Another good overview can be found by reading The Telegraph’s interview with Taleb
From Voice of America News (emphasis mine):
In comments to reporters after a briefing for President Bush, Rice sharply criticized Hamas, which she said has held the Gaza strip hostage since illegally seizing power there in 2007 and used the coastal strip as a “launch pad” against Israel – deeply contributing to the humanitarian crisis there.
(Thanks to Juan Ochoa for the tip)
An Indo-Pakistani nuclear war might conceivably take a *back page* to the fiscal crisis.
I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go. It’s gone. Nobody misses it. It got no burial. I knes was gonna be replaced by another development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright that might be.
Now I know. Welcome to 2009! […]
As Orlov accurately points out, in the Russian collapse, if you were on a farm or in some small neighborly town, you were toast. The hustlers in the cities were the ones with inventive opportunities, so they were the ones getting by.
So the model polity for local urban resilience isn’t Russia. I’m inclined to think the model there is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year
national existence.Before that time, Italy was all city-states — and not even “states,” mostly just cities. Florence, Milan, Genoa, Venice. Rome. They were really brilliantly-run, powerful cities. (Well, not Rome — but Rome
was global.) Gorgeous cities full of initiaive and inventive genius. If you’re a fan of urbanism you’ve surely got to consider the cities of the Italian Renaissance among the top urban inventions of all time.
Chris Hardwick of Hard ‘n Phirm tries Getting Things Done, Never Check E-Mail in the Morning, and The Four Hour Work Week.
Allen, Morgenstern, and Ferriss are a nicely compatible family unit: David Allen is the practical dad who reminds you not to overcomplicate things; just get the job done. Julie Morgenstern is the encouraging mom who, while hugging you, says, “It’ll be all right; you just need to focus on what’s important here.” And Tim Ferriss is the upstart kid who cries, “Think outside the box, man!” So in retrospect, it makes sense that I found it easier to cherry-pick elements from each and stitch together my own wearable cloak of efficiency. Now, I know that David Allen is the head vampire of productivity, but if you only have the fortitude to read a single book, I’m gonna throw my lithe frame behind The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss lays out a series of nimble yet perfectly legal cons to help you break out of the corporate Bastille—and work from the actual Bastille, if you want. That sly creativity best fits the rogue nature of the freelancer.
I recently wrote up details of my modded GTD implementation at Klintron’s Brain.
I recently read Four Hour Work Week, expecting to write a scathing review of it. But I’m actually getting a lot of mileage out of it, applying it to The Swift Fox. But I’m still a long way from quitting my day job, and I haven’t hired a personal assistant yet.
Stewart Brand, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Garret Lisi and about a bazillion more weigh in on this year’s Edge question:
New tools equal new perceptions.
Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.
And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.
Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.
Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.
Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”
Very nice to start the year with advice from Taleb
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