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Labels: Fort Wayne

Everything you wanted to know about the 16th president of the United States, and then some. For 77 years, the Lore, published by the Lincoln Museum in Ft. Wayne, Ind., has been examining every conceivable aspect of Lincoln and his world. After nearly 1,900 issues, its editors still haven't run out of things to say.

Labels: Fort Wayne

On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the sky.

The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of what may soon be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, helping to supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

All significant human behavior finds an advertiser.

Another thing I find interesting is that when big groups really want to get things done, they don't make the group bigger, they make the group smaller. For example, when Lockheed wanted to design the Stealth [bomber], they didn't scale up the team, they scaled the team down. When Congress really needs to consider something important, they form committees. When the military needs to conduct an operation with absolute precision, they usually call on the best small team they have. I think there's a lot corporate America can learn from that.

And I think it also begs the question: Why have small teams as exceptions? Why not make them the norm? If they do better work, and communicate more clearly, why not encourage more small teams?

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.

I think the criteria seems to have lessened as far as who's a critic and who's not. I just read reviews for things I've seen, and it seems like lately, in the last several years, I'm thinking, 'God, did we see the same thing?'

But I think that you have to look at a critic's physical appearance. Sometimes on TV or something, I see these critics, and the way they wear their hair… or they'll have a mustache without any irony, and I think, 'This guy's aesthetic criteria is so completely different from mine. What I think is cool is so not what he thinks is cool.' You go, 'What kind of music is this person listening to?' And then I go, 'All right, you know what? We have different tastes.' So it just puts their critical analysis in a different light.