blog.rightreading.com

After a long interval in which nothing happened, suddenly I’m back working on my little book about Persian ceramics (the trim size, 9.5 x 10 in., is small by museum publishing standards; it would have seemed large back in my text-based literary publishing days). This book required a map. I originally intended to send it [...]

A few months ago, scholars from the University of Graz in Austria released a 187-page pdf document, entitled Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google. (The file is large, so I recommend downloading and opening it from your hard disk rather than trying to access it through a browser.) The [...]

I was talking with someone the other day about website statistics packages. The image above comes from Google Analytics. As you can see, Right Reading has yet to develop a big presence in the markets of Belarus, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Oman, and much of Africa.
More significantly, what we are really seeing here is a [...]

The pies represent the colors of various flags, the sizes of the slices determined by percentage of flag area devoted to each color.
At the original site you can click on the pies to reveal which countries’s flags they represent.
Via Swiss Miss. 

In 1943 the U.S. War Department produced a book offering guidelines for our soldiers fighting in Iraq. It contained advice such as this:
The tall man in the flowing robe you are going to see soon, with the whiskers and the long hair, is a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerilla warfare. Few fighters in [...]

Bertelsmann is continuing its quest to be the print version of Google and control all the world’s paper-based information (all of it that’s profitable, that is) by expanding into China. It see China potentially generating 10 percent of its global sales revenue.

What country is this? CNN votes “Afghanistan.”
Hint: Try the Middle East and North Africa Map Game.

I’ve mentioned the website Strange Maps before. Here it is back again, with a map showing U.S. states renamed for countries with approximately equivalent gross domestic products. My state is France, evidement.

NewsMap lets you get the news from any country by clicking its location on a map. It’s basically a mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News.
Kind of cool but you could get the same information without going through the map.
Via Book of Joe.

That’s the headline I’m reading here. Seems Europeans have been gaining on us, to the point where Americans are now shorter than the average Dutchman. From the article:
Researchers have established in recent years that wealthier families tend to provide better nutrition for their children and, as a result, they tend to grow taller. The drastic [...]

With France mired in malaise, French voters have turned away from the center-right government of Jacques Chirac in favor of the center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Guardian has provided a interesting statistical comparison of the U.S. and France:
Population
US: 301m. France: 61m
Life expectancy
US: male 75.15 years, female 80.97 years.
France: male 77.35 years, female 84 years.
Working week
US: [...]