The New York Times reports that the city is readying itself for trouble during the Annual Meeting. One organiser is quoted as saying tens of thousands of protestors will be in the city during the meeting.
It serves both sides to ramp up the expected number for this kind of demonstration. I’d be surprised, however, in the aftermath of 11 September, if an anti-globalisation protest even in easy-to-access New York drew a crowd to rival Seattle, Prague or Genoa. And I have a lot more faith in the ability of the NYPD to police the event effectively and justly than the provincial Polizei of the Graubunden.
Artist John Klima has created something truly remarkable using data from Defence Department briefings. His Great Game uses a real-time map of Afghanistan, and game pieces are munitions, targets and troop movements. Apparently it doesn’t work on Macs and is iffy with Netscape 6.
Dave Winer pointed me to an article about the surging popularity of libraries. But other than talking about novel systems for checking them in and out, there’s no mention of libraries actually acquiring more books.
Where I grew up, the library was a wonderful, cosy place, filled with books. It’s years since I’ve been back, but my sister reports that the Glencoe Library has been “smartened” up, at the expense of books. Nicholson Baker, of course, has made the de-emphasis on books in American libraries one of his key causes.
I now have the privilege of going a couple of times a week to the world’s greatest private lending library. The London Library has one million books, many of them musty, squirreled away in a bewildering warren of stacks, bizarrely in a corner of one of London’s most elegant squares. Part of my definition of paradise. (There is, of course, a far greater library in London. But the British Library does not lend out its books and it sets impossibly high hurdles for a mere bibliomane to get a reader’s ticket.)
The world is facing a second consecutive year of no growth in per capita world output, according to the latest figures from the UN. Worse, populous, poor countries accounting for 40% of developing world population will raise their output by less than 3%, jeopardising poverty-reduction goals.
The poor get hit every way, it seems. The UN says most developing countries benefit less than the leaders in the upturns, but “suffer equally, or more so, in the downturns”.