“Three-quarters of all train travellers in the Netherlands are curious about the person sitting next to them on the train. More than 60 percent even say they would like to strike up a conversation sometime but find it awkward to do so.

“In Venezuela, Johnny Walker Black Label occupies a similar place to champagne in Britain: it is served at the best parties and smartest weddings, usually over ice in a tall glass, for some reason always wrapped in a paper napkin.

“India have now put together 73 century stands for the second wicket in Tests. Dravid has been involved in the last 24.

“The exact origins of the mango are unknown, but most believe that it is native to Southern and Southeast Asia.. Reference to mangoes as the “food of the gods” can be found in the Vedas..

“..if Dravid is serious about a five batsman team in the long run, the current series has entrenched a batsman who is dodgy against the short ball at the expense of perhaps the best player of fast bowling in the Indian team.

“To Westerners, “The Great Wave” seems to be the quintessential Japanese painting, yet it’s quite un-Japanese. Traditional Japanese would have never painted fishermen (one of the lowest and most despised of Japanese classes at the time); Japanese ignored nature; they would not have used perspective; they wouldn’t have paid much attention to the subtle shading of the sky. We like the woodblock print because it is familiar to us. The Giant Wave is a Western painting, seen through Japanese eyes.

“Pot and lame type systems like in C/C++ do not mix.

“Even after the death of Clipper and the launch of PGP, users didn’t want to encrypt their communications. The most effective barrier to the spread of encryption has turned out to be not control but apathy.

..the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. In response to the RIAA’s lawsuits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools that allow them to create encrypted spaces. This broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals..

The obvious parallel here is with Prohibition [which] created a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and millions of citizens engaged in an activity that was illegal but popular. This created several long-term effects in American society: greatly increased skepticism of Government-mandated morality, and broad support for anyone who could arrange for hidden transactions, including organized crime. Reversing the cause did not reverse the effects; both the heightened skepticism and the increased power of organized crime lasted decades after Prohibition itself was reversed.

As with Prohibition, so with file sharing.. the effects of the increased use of encryption, and the subsequent difficulties for law enforcement in decrypting messages and files, will last far longer than the current transition to digital music delivery, and may in fact be the most important legacy of the current legal crackdown [on piracy].

“Jerry Weinberg, “Secrets of Consulting”: You probably won’t be able to make any changes.

Reading this allowed me to let go of the idea that I was going to make any changes. And this ironically allowed me to see what was going on, and so I may have produced some small effect in the end. It may have simply been a change in perspective from “I’m the high-paid consultant who has been brought in to fix everything” to “I’m probably not going to be able to do anything here, so I’m open to anything where I might be able to make a difference.”