Watertown is a very wet place, as these photos show:
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The city has encouraged locals to spear as many carp as possible. Watertown, it’s in the water.
No trip to Watertown would be complete without a visit to Ebert’s Greenhouse Village.
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Introduction to Bioinformatics
Robert Jones provides a very useful introduction to Bioinformatics, or the the intersection of molecular biology and computer science.
Vacation in Orbit?
The idea is to create a new tourist industry: “For the last 30 years, people have thought that space flight is only for a select number of government employees,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and president of the X Prize Foundation, the competition’s organizer. “We want to change that mind-set.”
Andreessen on Current Technology
Wisconsin native Marc Andreessen (now living comfortably in Silicon Valley) participated in a Washington Post online chat yesterday. Andreessen discussed the tech business, new software tools, P2P/distributing information and open source software. He also touches on John Kerry’s statements on globalization and midwest manufacturing: “it’s not coming back”. A useful read.
Practical Superconductors
Versailles Restoration: Bosquet des Trois Fontaines
One of the 15 Ornamental groves in the gardens of Versailles will be reopened on June 12th.
It marks the latest in a series of American gifts to restore the great creation for Louis XIV of Andr? Le N?tre and Charles Le Brun. After the second world war John D. Rockefeller gave millions to restore the place, convinced that the chateau and its gardens were of wider than French significance. Americans then responded generously to storm damage in the 1990s, and now the American Friends of Versailles have given $4m and years of voluntary work to help French experts recreate the Bosquet des Trois Fontaines (the Three Fountains Grove).
British Gardening
The June 5, 2004 Economist reviews “A Little History of British Gardening“:
NAPOLEON called England a nation of shopkeepers: given the demise of the British high street, it would be more appropriate today to call it a nation of gardeners. The bicentenary of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) this year has spawned a green-fingered fever across a country where gardening is already a national pastime; where more than 15% of the population has a conservatory; where television gardeners are national heart-throbs; and where almost everyone has an opinion on rhododendrons
Latest Pew News Study
The latest Pew Research Center News Study shows that more than half the population has written off the traditional media (TV & Newspaper). Via VodkaPundit.
These type of changes will drive down traditional media spending… (and ad rates)
The MBA Menace….
Yuko Shimizu on Harvey Mintzburg’s new book: Managers not MBA’s
Congratulations! You have a sparkling new degree, highly prized in this world. You have learned a great many things about business. You have invested two years of your life, not to mention lost wages and a small fortune in tuition, in this impressive undertaking. As a result, you are fully qualified to go out and become a menace to society.
Granted, this isn’t fully the fault of your school. Nothing personal, but full-time MBA programs by their nature attract many of the wrong people–too impatient and analytical, with little experience in management itself. These may be fine traits for students, but they can be tragically ill-suited for managers.
Conventional MBA programs then compound the error by giving the wrong impression of management: that managers are important people disconnected from the daily work of making products and producing services; that managing is largely about decision making through analysis; that managers pronounce deliberate strategies for everyone else to implement; and worst of all, that by sitting still in a classroom for a couple of years, you are now ready to manage anything.
Tax Legislation for the Trash Heap
Steven Pearlstein updates us on the 930 pages in the recently passed Senate tax bill and the 398-page draft released last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas (R-Calif.).
With a few exceptions, both bills are grab bags of special-interest provisions designed to reward the well-connected at everyone else’s expense. They reward companies that have played cynical tax games and open up new vistas for the tax shelter industry. And while claiming that the purpose of the exercise was to create jobs in the United States, they will only enhance existing incentives for U.S. companies to earn their profits overseas.
Worse still, they are almost certain to add billions each year to a federal deficit that is already too high.