Dozens and dozens of beautiful libraries from many parts of the world. Go and look.
(Hat tip: Lance Knobel)

This fascinating post, part of a series on Chinese manufacturing that’s been picked up by BoingBoing, seems to be missing one very significant point. Yes, it’s all very cool; precision-machining billets of cold steel into incredibly perfect moulds that will be used to injection-mould the Chumby, blasting off the rough edges with an electron gun, [...]

Osama bin Laden is still at large. This American thinks that is a damn shame.
If you haven’t read 110 Stories, you should.
That is all.

Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

Browsing through the archives of EUTUBE, “the YouTube space of the European Commission”, I came across a video called 50 years of EU in the world. Since we haven’t really done anything special here on AFOE to commemorate the European Project’s 50th anniversary, I thought this video might be an appropriate birthday gift to our [...]

Physics Today has a very interesting, and refreshing, online article (hat tip Sargasso) on Islam and science that ties in neatly with AFOE’s review of Olivier Roy’s latest book Secularism confronts Islam. The article is written by Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. As usual, I shall give our [...]

Le Monde reports on a fascinating crisis, one that incorporates essentially all the themes of the times. In northern Niger lurk huge reserves of uranium, and the French nuclear power industry covers about a third of its requirements from mines there owned by Areva SA. It was this mining industry that Joe Wilson was ordered [...]

Last night I was in the downtown bookstore to pick up some stuff for travel planning, and I glanced over at their bestseller rack. Number one was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In English. The German edition won’t come out until October.
The best-selling book in the store is in a foreign language. That’s some [...]

As most of you will have already picked up, Japan today is having upper house elections. Japan’s current leader Shinzo Abe is widely thought to be in for a drubbing. Normally elections to the Japanese upper house would not be considered to be particularly important, but this time there are reasons to believe that things [...]

France needs to abandon its rejection of globalisation, right? Get with the programme? Join the war against terrorism? Or face simply becoming irrelevant? We’ve blogged plenty at AFOE about the bizarre notion that France and the United States are suddenly irreconcilable foes, but here is some definitive refutation. Defensetech.org reports that the USS Enterprise had [...]