Quentin Peel:

For a woman who is seen around the world as a disciplinarian, given to lecturing her European partners on the dangers of drowning in debt, the most surprising thing about Angela Merkel is her irrepressible sense of humour. It is hardly something you would expect from the chancellor of Germany when she greets you at the door of her office with a businesslike handshake and marches you smartly to a plain working table, boasting no more than a pot of coffee to serve to her guests.

The former scientist – daughter of a Protestant clergyman, brought up under communist rule in East Germany, who now dominates not only the domestic politics of her reunited homeland but also the interminable crisis-management of the EU – is cool and controlled. She thinks carefully before answering questions, and weighs all her words.

In countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain in southern Europe, where drastic austerity measures are blamed on the German chancellor, she has been lampooned by furious demonstrators as a jackbooted Nazi. Yet in northern Europe she is respected in many countries – including neighbouring France – above their own domestic politicians, according to a recent survey.

Chana Joffe-Walt:

“They pay attention to so much detail,” he said. “I never saw a Lego piece … that couldn’t go together with another one.”

Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.

Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there’s a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.

Michael Cameron:

The growth of big data and availability of APIs is providing exciting new opportunities for making sense of travel data, even for a fledgling start-up like Rome2rio.

Airfares fluctuate wildly, but do follow certain obvious trends; longer flights cost more, and some airlines are more expensive per mile flown than others.

We recently started an internal project aiming to model approximate/typical air fares for the flight itineraries assembled by our system. Our aim was to use this model to improve the accuracy of our multi-modal routing engine. However, in the process we generated some interesting data worth sharing with the industry.

We modeled airfares using some simple parameters. To do this, we examined the economy class airfares displayed by Rome2rio to users over the past 4 months, totalling some 1,780,832 price points. We grouped the airfares by distance and selected the 20th percentile fare for each distance (where 20% of fares are less, and 80% are more), to produce the following graph:

Fabius Maximus:

9-11 changed the course of a great nation, turning America decisively toward the dark side. Massive internal surveillance, militarization of police, endless war, hatred of Islam., torture, lifetime detention without trial, incessant propaganda, and a stream of fake terror plots (created by the government).

We pay for this with larger deficits, loss of global leadership, and corruption of our people (eg, jingoism, bloodlust). We see celebrate these things, the death of the America-that-once-was, by applauding the film “Zero Dark Thirty”.

Welcome to The New America! Brought to you by al Qaeda and the US government, with the willing assistance of the US people.