Hidden Offshore Money Hoards Revealed...and Other Transparency News

You may have heard that a consortium of journalists, working on a cache of 2.5 million recently spilled files, has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and mega-rich the world over. If preliminary reports prove to be true, it would be a revelation ten times larger than last year's WikiLeaks Affair and vastly more important. Indeed, it could portend the start of a worldwide radical movement for transparency that I forecast (including - for dramatic effect - a world war on Switzerland) in my 1989 novel Earth.   

For starters, see a chart detailing ongoing investigations into banking havens worldwide. Scan a wide range of reactions, from Russian officials, Europeans and others: 

--Tax Haven Data Leak Reverberates around the Globe

--Tax Havens Cause Poverty

--Release of Off-Shore Records draws Worldwide Response

This event appears to prove the contention I made back in 1989, in Earth -- that even world elites will have to adapt to a world much more filled with light. Specifically, these revelations may have short, intermediate and long term consequences.  In the near term, some cheaters and kleptocrats will be caught and some laws tightened, some cheat-havens hemmed in, public awareness and anger incrementally raised.  

The intermediate effect will be to cause the kleptos and New Oligarchs to pay more for increasingly clever methods of concealment, evasion and manipulation. Remain cynical, it will take a lot more than this. A whole lot more.

But over the longer term, a whole lot more is simply inevitable. We will see cascades of sudden revelation as these skulking methods prove inherently unreliable. They will be undermined by defections-of-conscience and by self-serving whistle blowers. By the fallibility of software and by the venality of henchmen. They will crack and leak, in any world that is short of Orwellian. At which point the world will choose. Shall we endure a return to the long, 6000 year era of law-protected oligarchy? Or will this signal the return to vigor of a civilization that is kept healthy by openness and accountability and light?

Yes, I am putting it in dramatic - even manichean - terms.  And I have probably understated the importance of the coming series of confrontations. In fact, let's make the prediction even more explicit than I made in Earth. 

FORECAST: This movement may be propelled - soon - by one or more radicalized nations in the developing world. Not radicalized by socialism or religion or dogmatic frenzy, but by the appearance of a new class of honest, grownup leaders at their helms. Imagine the fury that those leaders and their people will feel, when they suddenly realize just how much of their national wealth wealth was siphoned away by their own former kleptocrat lords. 

Vast amounts that those thieves took with them into exile.  Example: The Philippine Presidential Commission on Good Government probe into the disclosure that Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was a beneficiary of a secret offshore trust of prodigious proportions, in the British Virgin Islands… 

Now extrapolate this and you start to understand why the Swiss and other haven bankers have recently seemed willing - even eager - to strike semi-transparency deals with tax authorities in Europe and North America.  (1) Because those big countries have dangerous klout that must be placated by tossing overboard some merely-rich, sub-billionaire clients. But far more likely - (2) because the real business of lucrative banking secrecy lies in that mountain of klepto-hoards looted from much poorer nations. By striking deals with the IRS and EU tax boards, they hope to prevent alliances between developed and developing nations, in a grand consortium for transparency.

Only it won't work. Eventually, some nation like the Phillipines, or Indonesia or the former Zaire will be led by people graced with honesty, imagination and courage. Leaders who figured out, in advance, the pitfall traps such as blackmail. 

There are things that such nations and peoples can do -- exceptional, dramatic and boldly effective things -- that could transform the world. There are ways. And when it happens, remember where you first heard this.*

==  Pay attention… this is important ==

You Americans out there who actually want a return to a vigorous, problem solving nation, where politics is about negotiation and the Peoples' will and not regression into feudalism, you must pay attention to this. There is really nothing more urgent you will watch, probably ever! Because the ability of the American Experiment to remain healthy and solve every problem hangs in the balance.

I mean it.  Watch:  Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim.  

But this next matter is paramount, as well. One issue where I am a flaming, no-compromise radical, is a citizen's right to record encounters with authority, especially the police. Now the Obama Justice Department has made things starkly and abundantly clear.  It is now “settled law” that anyone is allowed to record or photograph police officers in public.  

A statement of interest – a legal term for when an agency or organization has a stake in the outcome of a trial, but not direct involvement – filed in the case of Mannie Garcia v. Montgomery County, Md., upholds the right of individuals to photograph police under the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This is more important than it may seem. Most cops are hardworking and well-intentioned men and women. Their instincts - inherited from ancient eras - are understandable... and must not be allowed to prevail in this matter.

But even as "settled law" it will be very very hard.  Note these cases: 

The NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg oppose surveillance of police.  See? Even "openness" democrats can't be trusted in this issue.

San Diego police attack, arrest man video recording them, claiming his phone could be weapon. 

Dinosaurs. In fact, this new era of omni-veillance will be essential and will help make policing easier! Especially if citizens feel they are partners and not victims. Take this example. NYPD fails to catch mugger for three weeks, but internet commenters catch him in one hour.  My "smart mobs" from Existence, taking form already.

Then it all moves to a new front. “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”  Terrorism?  This was prompted by animal rights groups video-recording scenes of horrific sadism and cruelty on farms and in slaughterhouses… going far beyond the normal bloody business necessitated by the carnivorality industry. This was exactly the sort of transparency that the industry ought to want, in order to rid themselves of vicious monsters, the way pedophiles are kept out of schools. When they get used to this and embrace it, the owners will have a cleaner and more efficient - and less Karma-burdened - business. 

And related news --  A judge has blocked Iowa State University from releasing documents about food safety research conducted for the beef-processing company that makes the product dubbed "pink slime" by critics. At the level of details, there are actually reasons for compromise in this case.  At the level of principle, none at all.  

This is not as crucial a situation as the taping of citizen contacts with police.  But it matters and light must be allowed to shine.

Oh, but sinking lower than slaughterhouses… on a secretly-recorded tape, GOP Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and his advisors are heard laughing and joking about opposition research they had on actress Ashley Judd, who had been considering running against McConnell next year. Many Democratic groups blasted McConnell for the remarks, disgusted by the fact McConnell would potentially use Judd's suicidal thoughts as a child against her. In reactionn came a firestorm or protest against eavesdropping by "leftist agitators."  Um, get used to it. Stop being led by crude people. Go back to choosing grownups. It really is that simple.

Interesting times indeed.

==  Augmented reality... and catching liars ==

Compare these two images of Rome during the election of the last pope in 2005 and more recently in 2013.  Then contrast the images to my descriptions of "tru-vu goggles" in EARTH (1989) and the gel-lens stalks people wear in 2048, portrayed in EXISTENCE. 

How quickly are we moving toward the world of Augmented Reality (AR)?

Get used to expanded power of video to appraise tiny changes, measure your pulse at a distance and enhance our already tremendous ability to pick patterns out of backgrounds.  These methods developed at MIT will help us all thrive in Augmented Reality… or else prove powerful tools for tyranny.  We'll get best outcomes from them if we all embrace them.  Openly. 

Indeed, after reading that article, ponder my 1980 novel Sundiver in which vision-based lie-detectors (inescapable, wherever there is light) utterly transform politics. 

I predict that by 2016 there will be lurid claims from "experts" on all sides, claiming to catch fibs by opponents talking in public or on TV... experts who are then "shown" to be lyingI It will be chaos, at first.  Then this stuff will become an App. And by 2020 or 2024? A useful tool> Possibly a sieve for psychopaths and monsters? Can you see yet why - for so many reasons - the clade of already-powerful psychopaths is growing desperate?

== And more transparency crux-points ==

Perching: Video, released by the Air Vehicle Directorate, shows a pigeon-like drone that can draw power from an electrical wire while its camera watches a target. These and other new-style drones are part of a fascinating and problematic future. Stay alert. 

In a fascinating article, Technology Review explains how a huge black market has developed for "zero-day" systemic flaws in programs and operating systems, especially in mobile devices.  These can be exploited by governments or corporations of criminal gangs, especially in mobiles, that get infrequent security updates.  A cottage industry of hackers now swops in to find flaws and back doors and chinks in security and then sells them at high prices.  The article raises this as a scary scenario… but in fact I am not so sure.  Isn't this how an immune system functions? T Cells that discover an invader and ways to neutralize it are rewarded within your own body; they are given resources to reproduce.  Is that any different from a government agency saying: "Come to us with your clever discovery of a flaw.  We'll pay better than the criminals do… and you won't risk jail."  See: the Malware industrial complex and the trade in zero-day vulnerabilities.

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software called RIOT capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites. Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.  

Curious whether a prescription or medical device your doctor is recommending comes from a manufacturer who has been paying your doctor? Good news, then: The federal government has finally developed a plan for how the Physician Payments Sunshine Act will work. The Sunshine Act, made federal law as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, was designed to allow anyone -- patients, doctors, journal editors -- to look up which doctors are getting how much from which companies.  

== And yet MORE transparency news… ==

See the stunningly huge number of new top level domains that are under consideration by ICANN. 

These guys consulted me. Koozoo envisions a world where a network of smartphone cameras will anticipate your needs and offer streaming video that fills them. But that's future talk. For now, it will just put up cameras anywhere it can.

In the wake of the famous WikiLeaks events, a large number of emulation sites popped up around the world, aiming to blow the whistle on corruption from Bulgaria to India to Nicaragua. Most of these clones never got very far and appear to have all but shut down. Balkanleaks seems to be just one of a handful still actively receiving and publishing new documents. (Note, I long supported Witness since 1990 or so, a more robust model that does not rely on inherently fragile encryption methods.) As I described in The Transparent Society, maintaining methods of aggressive accountability, threatening the dark secrets of powerful men, is a dangerous game and secret codes are only the tip of what's required. 

States are pondering or passing laws to restrict the use of drones for camera use in the skies over public realms like highways. This is not where we should be concentrating our freedom and privacy protecting efforts.  All such laws will do is hamper the good aspects of drone use while compelling elites of government and wealth to make their surreptitious drones smaller.  More like birds and insects and harder to detect. The failure of imagination of these people…. 

The thing we need is not to try to blind elites… that has never ever worked. (Show me one historical example. One.)  What we must pursue is sousveillance, our ability to look back at power. to see with our own drones etc.  And, above all, to make fresh, agile deals every time an issue like this comes up. 

"You say that you, our protectors, need more vision to better protect the public?  Fine.  But in return you must undergo more supervision.  Citizens in the control rooms.  Citizens on the panels that issue licenses. Webcams in boardrooms.  You may see better, in order to serve us better.  But you are a watchdog, not a wolf! And here is your choke chain. Accept it - and your role as a public servant - or else we will hire others."

== And more! ==

Brad Foster puts into perspective the ever-rising tsunami of information and how crushing is the hypersonic waves of… bullshit. Just a few small examples:  Netflix consumes a THIRD of all internet traffic. Four billion shares on Facebook every day.  Eric Schmidt of Google says 5 exabytes of information were created by humanity till 1980.  We now create that much every two days.  Frost goes a bit over the top in his denunciations and diagnoses, but he concludes there has never been a better time for people to find ways around the BS and slim down, in order to be creative, or useful, or focus on what you can do that does (or is) some good. 

Political note: The FCC and Obama Department of Justice appear to be leaning toward favoring smaller mobile phone companies in releasing more cell tower spectrum, in order to encourage more competition with Verizon and AT&T. This may be a crucial sign of sentiment as the FCC also decides whether to release spectrum for major citizen-access use of WiFi type systems anywhere in the continent. 

== Brin on Beck? Via Penn Jillette? The strange world of Transparency ==

I was mentioned on Glenn Beck! In a "surprisingly cordial discussion" between Glenn Beck and Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller). Penn mentioned me twice, citing The Transparent Society (about 34 and 41 minutes in). I consider Penn to be a true paladin of freedom, worthy of my greatest compliment… that he and I would both have been quickly burned at the stake under any tyranny. (You, too, should strive to be burnable!) But in this wondrous civilization he and I are instead well paid to provoke and stir the pile, joyously yelling at each other and in all directions. Progress indeed. 

Beck? Well, he was courteous and calm on this occasion.  Go watch a discussion between a sane-openminded (though rambunctiously provocative) true-libertarian and a tendentiously delusional faux-libertarian shill for the new lords… but still a good mind-stretch for those of you who need to wallow now and then, in smart perspectives that challenge you. 

== Coda ==

A final set of sad notes. I have spoken elsewhere of the terrible news that both Jay Lake and Iain Banks are in desperate fights against cancer. I will speak more of that later. (They are great writers and let's all send our best vibes.) Now comes news that the son of eminent science fiction author Dave Wolverton - AKA David Farland - suffered a terrible accident recently. Past fans of Dave's work - or folks interested in trying something new - might have a look at his novel Nightingale… or else, if you are a would be writer, consider Million Dollar Outlines, in which Dave offers would-be best-sellers advice how to analyze an audience and outline a novel so that it can appeal to a wide readership. Or make a donation:
Help Ben Walk.

------------
* Oh, but by then I may have been bribed into denying it all! No serious offers so far.  You - the smart public - should feel insulted by that! Think about it.



David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com
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Questions I am frequently asked about… (Part V) Transparency, Privacy and the Information Age

I'll now complete my compilation of questions that I’m frequently asked by interviewers. They can all be found on my website. This final section is about… 

== PRIVACY AND TRANSPARENCY==  

Note that my tenure as an expert in these matters arose from the 1997 publication of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?  which won the American Library Association's Freedom of Speech Award and the McGannon Public Policy Prize.  It revealed many surprising aspects to a vexing and complex set of problems that we must negotiate and navigate in the coming decades, with nothing at stake... other than liberty, survival, and all the things that make life worth living.

For more detail, see a compilation of some articles and interviews  about transparency, freedom and technology .

--Do you worry about the loss of privacy as both the government and amateurs have more and more access to surveillance?

I got some of my nicest letters based on Chapter 9 of The Transparent Society, where I disassemble my own theory, appraise and talk about all sorts of ways that a transparent society could go wrong! For example, you could have a really nasty version of majority-rule, such as Ray Bradbury shows in Fahrenheit 451. Even if transparency prevents Big Brother, will that mean we’ve traded top-down tyranny for the lateral kind? Oppression by hundreds of millions of judgmental Little Brothers? 

Serious concerns, Still, real life offers reason to hope. If you look at the last 50 years, whenever the public learns more about some eccentric group, it judges that group on one criterion: Is this group mean? 

Are they harmful and oppressive to others? When the answer is yes, the more we learn about the group, the less they’re tolerated. If the answer is no, the more we learn about the group, the more they’re tolerated. Look back. More exposure and information about others reduced racism, sexism, homophobia... but increased our aversion to groups like the KKK or Stalinists.  No other criterion explains this. 

If that’s true and if it holds in the future—if people continue to defend others’ eccentricities because...

a) they think it’s cool to live in a world of harmless eccentrics and... 

b) for the sake of their own protection—then you would likely see a 51 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent dictatorship by a majority that insists on crushing just one thing… intolerance. Okay, that’s still group-think majority-imposed will. But the least harmful one you can imagine. 

As far as privacy itself is concerned, I have a simple answer to that. (It makes up Chapter Four of The Transparent Society.) Human beings want it. We naturally are built to want some privacy. Moreover, if we remain a free and knowing people, then sovereign citizens will demand a little privacy, though we’ll find that we must redefine the term for changing times. 

The question really boils down to: Will tomorrow’s citizens be free and knowing? Will new technologies empower us to exert reciprocal accountability, even upon the mighty? It may seem ironic, but for privacy and freedom to survive, we’ll need a civilization that is mostly open and transparent, so that each of us may catch the would-be voyeurs and Big Brothers.  So that most of us know most of what’s going on, most of the time. 

It can happen!  The proof is us.  Because it is already the method that we’ve used for 200 years. And to see this all laid out, have a look at one of the only public policy books from the 20^th Century that’s still in print and selling more each year. 

--What do you foresee as tiny cameras proliferate? 

Essentially, this is the greatest of all human experiments.  In theory… sousveillance (looking at the mighty from below) should cancel our worst fears about the surveillance state, if we get into the habit of stripping the mighty naked. 

If that happens, we should eventually equilibrate into a situation where people - for their own sakes and because they believe in the Golden Rule, and because they will be caught if they violate it - eagerly and fiercely zoom in upon areas where others might be conniving or scheming or cheating or pursuing grossly-harmful deluded paths… 

… while looking away when none of these dangers apply. A socially sanctioned discretion based on “none of my business” and leaving each other alone… because you’ll want that other person to be your ally next time, when you are the one saying “make that guy leave me alone!” 

That is where it should wind up.  If we’re capable of calm, or rationality and acting in our own self-interest.  It is stylishly cynical for most people to guffaw, at this point, and assume this is a fairy tale. I can just hear some readers muttering “Humans aren’t like that!” 

Well, maybe not. But I have seen plenty of evidence that we are now more like that than our ancestors ever imagined they could be.  The goal may not be attainable.  But we’ve already taken strides in that direction.

-What do you see as the major problem in achieving a more transparent society?

When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.

-How will greater openness affect our society?

We already live in the openness experiment, and have for two hundred years. It is called the Enlightenment -- with "light" both a core word and a key concept in our turn away from 6,000 years of feudalism. All of the great enlightenment arenas -- markets, science and democracy -- flourish in direct proportion to how much their players (consumers, scientists and voters) know, in order to make good decisions. To whatever extent these arenas get clogged by secrecy, they fail.

But the next step in people empowerment is even more impressive -- those burgeoning "smart mobs" Howard Rheingold and Clay Shirky and Vernor Vinge talk about. (Also shown in my latest novel, Existence.) It's agile. It's wired. 

Every generation innovates, or the Enlightenment dies.

- In EARTH (1989) you forecast that a huge world issue in the 2010s and 2020s would be international banking secrecy. Now, daily revelations seem to be bearing that out.  Do you still foresee something like a "Helvetian War"?

An actual, physical war, waged by nations of the developing world against the great banking havens?  Well, not really.  That was an exaggerated metaphor for a novel that achieved dramatic effects. But I do still expect increasing radicalization and pressure from many newly rising nations, when they realize that their former, kleptocratic lords stole literally trillions that might save and give hope to millions of children back home, if the money were recovered.

This issue won't go away. Just recently (April 2013) a cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open, spilling the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over. In my novel, Earth, I predicted this would be the core issue of our times.  I still think things will play out that way.

See: more articles about Transparency and Openness

Or return to Part 1: Questions on Writing and Science Fiction

Part 2: Questions on Science Fiction and Fantasy

Part 3: Questions on Brin books and The Postman

Part 4: Questions about Prediction and the Future

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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Hugo Awards and other Science-Fictional News

Congratulations to this year's nominated novels (and their brilliant authors) for the 2012 best of the year Hugo Award in Science Fiction.

Nominees for best novel include 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson , Blackout, by Mira Grant, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, by John Scalzi, and Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed.   These works show the incredible range of modern SF, from grownup literary speculation about the future to humor to consistent series to quasi-fantasy.  I am proud to be part of such a bold movement dedicated to the exploration of ideas.

Don't just read and enjoy the nominated works. Join and attend this year's Science Fiction Worldcon (we'll be there)! And attend the Hugo ceremony at Lone Star Con this August in San Antonio.

Again, felicitations to our proud and deserving colleagues!  Oh, also have a look at the other categories, which include short works by long-time greats Nancy Kress and Pat Cadigan ... as well as works by rising young stars like Kij Johnson and Ken Liu and others.  Many of the shorter works are now available for viewing or downloading for free.

== Smart Mobs in Real Life? ==

See real-life plans to empower "smart mobs." In Existence I portray -- among many aspects of our world 30 years from now -- the fluid and skilled use of Smart Mobs, or ad hoc groups of amateur citizens who use rapid access to vast information troves, plus sophisticated analytics tools, to attack and deal with real-time problems more quickly and effectively than even the pros in government or industry.  Such effective use of flat, "networked" systems is (at best) in its early days. (See my novella, The Smartest Mob, as well Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.)

Facebook and Twitter were effective at calling out rioters during the Arab Spring. They are inherently limited at coordinating the expert abilities of far-flung citizens, dividing tasks, coalescing the Big Picture and drawing effective conclusions. You can't blame members of our professional castes for deeming this a sci fi hope and little more.

Still, consider that the government's best tools tend to enter corporate use within a decade and private hands soon after. Vast data streams and sophisticated analytics might lead to "smart-mob" empowered citizen action networks… that is, if certain enabling technologies surfaced.  Better forms of online discourse, for example (I have patents!) And software that rise above TwitBook lobotomization, encouraging us to be smarter than the sum of our parts, not a whole lot dumber.

Walter Lasecki of the University of Rochester is one fellow who at least seems to get what's needed. I cannot attest to how these ideas are executed. But advanced collaboration-ware would be a great start.

== Most Iconic Characters? ==

For a recent interview I was asked to name the "most iconic science fiction characters" I could think of.  Well, well.  On the one hand...

...science fiction has always conveyed certain rebel themes. For example, the character who is able to remake herself or himself and rise up to meet insurmountable challenges. One who comes to mind is Helva, in Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, whose crippling handicaps  are resolved when she becomes the "brain" of a starship and goes on to achievements her earlier self could not have imagined. A grittier version would be Gully Foyle, a low-class space hand in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, who makes mistake after mistake but finds his way to world-changing greatness. This is often an underlying theme in the classic series Star Trek, wherein the products of Star Fleet Academy and the Federation as a whole - like Captains Kirk and Picard and Janeway - typify the iconic self-made hero.

Of course there is another theme, one that is far older than the rather American notion of self-improvement.  That theme is the demigod.  The born prince who suffers the abuse of fools until... lo! ... he comes into his powers.

This approach goes back to Homer and pervaded most legends till our time. Indeed, it is still the propellant of comic books.  It was extolled by Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, wherein Campbell left out all the dark sides to this ancient, limiting and morally-dubious storytelling pattern.  In science fiction, famous adherents included  A.E. Van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard and, more recently, Orson Scott Card, whose every protagonist is born to be better than humanity at large and vested with the perfect-inherent right to over-rule any democratic institutions standing in his way.

Sometimes these characters aren't cruel in their own right: take Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter.  The trope does not have to be deliberately oppressive! Indeed, Robert Heinlein's iconic Lazarus Long relentlessly works for humanity and helps us to find our own, independent strength, just as Tolkien's born-prince - Aragorn - has a common touch.  Still, these are "icons" of a side of science fiction that is older and more deeply tied to our feudal-romantic past. Those who keep returning to it are doing us no favors.

When I saw all of this in an epiphany, one day, I vowed to try to avoid Nietzschean ubermensche demigod-superman types and stick to characters who are merely way, way above average.

Have you seen my more extensive essay, Our Favorite Cliche: The Idiot Plot, where I decrypt WHY so many sci fi tales and movies go for the easy crutch of the uber-demigod hero... or else posit that society is useless and ALL our fellow citizens are fools?

== And some random thoughts… ==

I'll be on the road for a week, consulting for some agencies and such… so these snippets will have to hold you.

Took the family on a long, overnight, clickety-clack rail journey across much of China, back in 2007. It seems we were very lucky to travel from Xian to Chengdu when we did - the next time you travel in China it will be via High Speed Rail and by 2020 there will be 50,000 kilometres of it. Wow.  In the same time period California will have built out 1% of that - 500km or so. We have got to rediscover ambition.

Okay, fair enough! A satirical music video from South Africa, where youth there decide to help freezing Norwegians by sending them radiators. Delicious. Respect-worthy. Good music and images, too.

38 maps of the US and the world that take unusual perspectives.

Is this for real? The O.R.B. is a ring you wear on your finger that twists into a bone conduction earpiece-phone.  Oh, I've got something better.  Whatever wristwatch phone thing Apple comes up with, my design is better and those companies who get jealous of the Apple watch should get in touch!

A big project in London to bore 32 km of new tube/metro/subway lines using giant tunneling machines.

And another project in New York, where deep tunneling wasn't the norm. (Most NY subways  were shallow-trenched. Not very useful in an emergency or Blitz!)

A thought-provoking illustrated polemic as to who better predicted our (dystopic) future, Orwell or Huxley?

Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books: A new analysis of words in scanned Google books indicates that English speakers becoming less emotional (but American English is decidedly more emotional than British English).

And finally… a wondrous-hilarious re-do of the great "Who's on First" Abbott and Costello routine… only redone in Shakespearean dialect.

Thrive-all and persevere.