copper

copper est une série de panneaux de comics d'un jeune homme appellé Copper et de son chien dans des mondes issues des rêves de Copper. La qualité du dessin et le niveau de détail est exceptionnel. Les histoires semblent simples à la première lecture mais révèlent souvent une réflexion philosophique profonde qui font autant réfléchir que sourire.

Wall Street on the Tundra: Iceland

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904

Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish. Each fisherman was assigned a quota, based roughly on his historical catches. If you were a big-time Icelandic fisherman you got this piece of paper that entitled you to, say, 1 percent of the total catch allowed to be pulled from Iceland’s waters that season. Before each season the scientists at the Marine Research Institute would determine the total number of cod or haddock that could be caught without damaging the long-term health of the fish population; from year to year, the numbers of fish you could catch changed. But your percentage of the annual haul was fixed, and this piece of paper entitled you to it in perpetuity.

[...]

Even better, if you didn’t want to fish you could sell your quota to someone who did. The quotas thus drifted into the hands of the people to whom they were of the greatest value, the best fishermen, who could extract the fish from the sea with maximum efficiency. You could also take your quota to the bank and borrow against it, and the bank had no trouble assigning a dollar value to your share of the cod pulled, without competition, from the richest cod-fishing grounds on earth. The fish had not only been privatized, they had been securitized.

[...]

The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

[...]

Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

Study: Cat Parasite Affects Human Culture

Infection by a Toxoplasma gondii could make some individuals more prone to some forms of neuroticism and could lead to differences among cultures if enough people are infected, says Kevin Lafferty, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Gobekli: le paradis originel?

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

Quote from "Scandanavian Nonbelievers, Which Is Not to Say Atheists "

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized - Part 1

WOW - n'oubliez de continuer avec la partie 2!

Les dangers du café...

Oldelaf - le café

Pays et contenus

Est-ce que les pays produisent sur Internet un contenu proportionnel avec leur population? Une question intéressante surtout pour le Canada qui voudrait taxer l'Internet pour promovoir les contenus locaux.

Pour le Canada (population 33M), nous avons ce nombre-ci de pages retournées pour une recherche sur le mot-clé correspondant:

• Canada: 825M
• Canadian: 226M
• Canadien: 12M

Québec, population 7.75M:

• Québec: 161M, Quebec: 144M
  
• Quebecois/Québécois: 17.5M

Taiwan, population 23M:

• Taiwan: 276M
• Taiwanese: 9.7M
• "中華民國": 13.4M
• "臺灣人": 3.4M, "台灣人": 6.6M

Pas très scientifique mais le Canada semble quand même bien se tenir. Les chiffres seraient plus intéressants divisé par le produit national brut per capita.