Posted by MICHAEL KIMMELMAN to NYT > Arts.

I called Rafael Corazza, director of the Competition Commission, to ask what he was thinking. “It’s not normal for one market to have special regulations,” he explained. “It was a cartel. The German and Swiss booksellers said it was for a good purpose — they made a cultural argument, but we are an economic commission. They said the system fosters a broader, deeper market for books, that discounting will hurt the small booksellers who support the small publishers, and then you will have fewer books and more focus on best sellers.”

Are they right? I asked.

“I’m not quite sure they’re completely wrong,” he said. “Nobody knows for sure yet. But nobody can read one million titles, so the question is, is it better that more people read fewer books or that fewer people read a lot of different books?”

Via Schneier on Security.

In a garden in Birchington, best friends Holly Prentice and Jojo Roberts, both aged eight, make daisy chains.

The picket fence marks the limit of their play area. They wouldn't dare venture beyond it.

"You might get kidnapped or taken by a stranger," says Jojo.

"In the park you might get raped," agrees Holly.

Unfucking believable.

Posted by Bruce Sterling to Beyond the Beyond.

Something very strange is happening at University of Bologna… It seems that the University is organizing a “find the treasure” game of “Crediti Formativi Universitari” , “university credits”.

Via Warrenellis.com.

A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a programme in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys. Political parties have called for The Big Donor Show to be scrapped, but broadcaster BNN says it will highlight the country’s shortage of organ donors. The programme, from Big Brother creators Endemol, is due to be screened on Friday night.

Update: It was a hoax. Too bad.

Via /..

A recent study at the University of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain processing.

Posted to Economist.com News Analysis.

Our Asia editor compares China's satellites

Read more at Economist.com News Analysis.

Posted by ROBIN POGREBIN to NYT > Arts.

Husband-and-wife collaborations are part of a broad trend that is changing the traditional definition of architecture partnerships.

Read more at NYT > Arts.

Posted by pk to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.

Lovely Gene Weingarten piece in the weekend WashPost on whether one of the nation's great musicians -- violinist Joshua Bell -- can make any money busking incognito in a Washington subway at rush hour.

Too bad the article is so long, just skim it.

Found via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.

Why Chicks Don’t Dig The Singularity - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine).

I’m at Burning Man, and I’m riding my bike around. [… O]ver my left shoulder I hear the word “gene;” I hear the word “memes,” and I stop. And there’s this very unassuming white tent with a bunch of people sitting around on chairs as if they were at a lecture hall. And there’s this good-looking guy in a woman’s nightie. […] I listened to the lecture and thought, “That’s a fascinating guy!” It turned out he was doing a lecture every day, so I kept coming back. The third time I came back, I was on a hallucinogen.

So Ray Kurzweil got up there and Moira Gunn was interviewing him, and everybody got to submit a question. And Moira would pick her three favorite questions. So there were all these technical questions about how will the singularity do this, how will the singularity do that. And my question was, “How will the Singularity get laid… err help me get laid?” So she picked my question as an extra one as a way of dismissing it. She said, “Somebody put a joke question in here, and can you believe that there are people here who would write something like this? It’s ‘how will the Singularity help me get laid?’” And then she throws it aside and tries to move on to another question. But Kurzweil says, “Hang on. Hang on. I want to answer that.” And then he goes into this long technical description…