Years of Poems and Spirits

Read this article on NYT: “Spy Agencies Told to ‘Bolster the Growth of Democracy’ ”

Summary:
Among other things, the strategy says that “collectors, analysts and operators” within the 15 American intelligence agencies should seek to “forge relationships with new and incipient democracies” in order to help “strengthen the rule of law and ward off threats to representative government.” The strategy, published on www.dni.gov, is unclassified, and the officials said it was not intended to apply in any way to any covert action that might be undertaken by the United States.

—Liberal democracy, rule of law can only exist in total transparency. The thought of having spy agencies to get involved is just stupid beyond comprehension.

Read this NYT article about a new discovery in laser technology. Basically, it says we now are a lot more closer to a future digital world based on optical infrastructure (vs. today’s mainly electronic one)

The promises:
“The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear potentially more than 10 times faster than the highest-performance commercial products available today.”

“… optical data networks were now on the same Moore’s Law curve of increasing performance and falling cost that has driven the computer industry for the past four decades.”

The highlight:
… said David A.B. Miller, from Stanford University: “Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years.”

–That professor must be living in a different time-space from the rest of us.

I did not know the role Mara played in NFL history until seeing the orbituaries in Washington Post and NYT.

I thought Revenue Sharing epitomized “capitalist vision”. Can’t imagine that in China. Absolutely no way.

According to the WP article, he was an incredibly kind person. History scholars seldom gave much thought to “agents” of history rather than “structures” (as in Structuralism). Without Mara, it seemed, Football wouldn’t be where it is today.