She had absolutely no fear, dancing all the way down & up the catenary... we had so much fun that day - up Grouse Mountain in total fog; over the bridge & around the treetops (twice!) at Capilano; and down into the Stanley Park aquarium to check on the belugas.

And all this after spending three hours listening to Bill Edgar talk about jazz & theology while learning to knit from Barb Edgar. She had quite the day!

IN MAKING THE LIST, his 2001 book about best sellers, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda recalls that the publishing house once commissioned a study of which books made the most money. After a detailed presentation, the consultant said to the editors, "Do you guys realize how much money the company would make if you only published best sellers?" He might as well have told them that they'd do better playing the lottery if they picked the right numbers. Trends come and go, but the best seller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it. "As a rule of thumb," writes John Sutherland, an English scholar who has studied the phenomenon, "what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else."

via bookforum.com.

A Canadian group is pioneering a high-tech web system that allows diners around the world to track their seafood back to the person who caught it. Participating fishermen tag their catch and the information is entered intoThisfish.info.

Earlier this week, Nova Scotian Gordon Beaton caught a lobster in the Northumberland Strait, tagged it and sold it on. A couple of days later, Toronto diner Lynn Patterson ordered lobster at the Royal York Hotel.

She pulled out her iPad, went to Thisfish and entered the code.

"It's coming up," she said as the site tracked the lobster. "[It] tells us what it is, of course, an Atlantic lobster. Who caught it — a guy called Gordon Beaton! Caught in the Northumberland Strait two days ago. Fresh, fresh, fresh!"

Diners can log into Thisfish.info and see where their dinner came from. CBCBeaton was pleased to learn his lobster's final destination.

"Well that's good. I'm glad it made it to such a good place," he said.

via CBC News.

Throughout history, relations between dominant and rising states have been uneasy—and often violent. Established powers tend to regard themselves as the defenders of an international order that they helped to create and from which they continue to benefit; rising powers feel constrained, even cheated, by the status quo and struggle against it to take what they think is rightfully theirs. Indeed, this story line, with its Shakespearean overtones of youth and age, vigor and decline, is among the oldest in recorded history. As far back as the fifth century BC the great Greek historian Thucydides began his study of the Peloponnesian War with the deceptively simple observation that the war’s deepest, truest cause was “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” The fact that the U.S.-China relationship is competitive, then, is simply no surprise. But these countries are not just any two great powers: Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been the richest and most powerful nation in the world; China is, by contrast, the state whose capabilities have been growing most rapidly. America is still “number one,” but China is fast gaining ground. The stakes are about as high as they can get, and the potential for conflict particularly fraught.

At least insofar as the dominant powers are concerned, rising states tend to be troublemakers. As a nation’s capabilities grow, its leaders generally define their interests more expansively and seek a greater degree of influence over what is going on around them. This means that those in ascendance typically attempt not only to secure their borders but also to reach out beyond them, taking steps to ensure access to markets, materials and transportation routes; to protect their citizens far from home; to defend their foreign friends and allies; to promulgate their religious or ideological beliefs; and, in general, to have what they consider to be their rightful say in the affairs of their region and of the wider world.

via The National Interest.

This is the American worker's saga. The stuff you're making is getting cheaper. The stuff you need is getting more expensive. That's why you feel so squeezed. "That's a provocative idea," James Manyika tells me on the phone when I read through my theory. "I want to make a key point." The things getting more expensive fall into two categories, he said. You have the failures of productivity, including education, government, construction, and health care. Then you've got natural economic scarcity, like physical living space and crude oil.

"Health care is our most important failure of productivity," he says. "Many of the costs that go into health care are not open to competition. The nice thing about retail is that the costs are transparent. The management fees on your brokerage account are transparent and competitive and competed for. You don't know what the management costs for your health care plan are, because those are opaque. There's less incentive to make them cost effective. That's one reason why you've seen so few gains in health care productivity."

***

The presumption in Washington is that as long as we have a growing economy, everything will work out, and if productivity rises, jobs and wages will follow. It turns out that growth and productivity, while not at all evil, are not panaceas, either. GDP growth has been decoupled from job growth. Productivity has been decoupled from wages. What's good for work has been decoupled from what's good for workers.

"What can we do about that?" Manyika said at the end of our talk. I waited for him to say something. We're all still waiting.

via The Atlantic.