Dalrymple and Zweig

Anthony Daniels, otherwise known as Theodore Dalymple, accords with Stefan Zweig:

impulsive pity for others is a dangerous emotion which embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous results.

How Gates works

Bill Gates uses 3 screens and filters his email to 100 messages a day. He relies on flagged emails and desktop folders monitoring selected content rather than to-do lists. He uses Microsoft products and an old-fashioned whiteboard. And sadly he's not giving much more than that away. The picture at the bottom of the article catches a slightly vulnerable-looking Bill Gates. (Source: Slashdot)

The Gospel of Judas

The National Geographic have a micro-site on The Gospel of Judas. According to this codex, Jesus wanted to die in order to be free of the flesh, and Judas was the only disciple who understood his teachings enough to oblige him. There's a fascinating timeline on the site about the early church. It was a time of ideological struggle within Christianity as well as the transition period between the Roman and Christian worlds.

The London Review of Books

Stephen Pollard is justifiably steamed up that the London Review of Books gets 20 grand a year from the Arts Council.

I once subscribed to the LRB and was a bit in awe of the learning of its contributors.

Through falling out out of love with it, I learnt that cleverness and being right are not the same thing.

Stephen Pollard calls the magazine "the house magazine of the unthinking knee jerk liberal left".

Actually it is the home of dried-up old socialists who deserve nothing but ridicule.

Lampedusa

I did read and enjoy his most famous book but I knew very little about Lampedusa himself.

Slum classicism

There's a great piece about self-education in the working class at City Journal (the link was from Laban Tall).

Scavenging through your own rubbish

Tim Worstall on recycling schemes:

"None of the calculations about recycling in general or any specific scheme such as this one include the time and effort put into sorting the items before disposal or collection. So we have left out one of the major costs associated with recycling, making sure that economic cost and real cost have diverged. Add back in the cost of that labour and the real costs will be hugely greater than the real value produced for most schemes."

I prefer to think of it as being forced to scavenge through my own rubbish.

Boot Sale Sounds

A curious blog about music picked up at junk shops.

Adsense abroad

GoogleBlog had this from USA Today about the emerging AdSense economy:

Thanks to Adsense, a blogger in New Delhi can earn the same 5 cents for an ad-click as a blogger in Detroit. For many Adsense users in the developing world, that opportunity has become perhaps the most unintentional — and most successful — development program to spring from the online revolution.

Possibly the story was planted with the newspaper by Google themselves, but it's a pleasing thought anyway.