Ryugyong Hotel

I came across this Esquire article on what has to be one of the weirder hotels I've ever seen. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly, given how weird it is), it is in Pyongyang. The part that is mind blowing to me is that its construction was supposedly consuming about 2% of the North Korean GDP! To put that in persective: 2% of US GDP in 2005 would have been a burn rate of $250 billion!

I can't help but think of Kim Jong-il in Team America. That Wikipedia picture is so dope.

Books That Make You Dumb

Sure, a bit of a facetious title, but check out this interesting informal analysis. Ben will surely find something to smile about there (the school listing, as well as the author's origin)...

Talk About A Roundabout Route..

Check out the crazy back story of the new Chief Economist at the World Bank (from Marginal Revolution):

Justin Yifu Lin, apparently soon to be named the World Bank's chief economist, has one of the strangest CVs you could imagine. Lin was born in Taiwan but in 1979 while serving in the Taiwanese army he defected to China by swimming from the island of Kinmen in Taiwan to Xiamen in China. Embarrassed by the defection of a rising star, the Taiwanese army listed him as missing. Lin left behind a wife and children who (it seems) didn't know what had happened to him.

Lin rose quickly in China receiving a Master's degree in Marxist political economy from Peking University in 1982 and in 1986 a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago (!). According to the Taipei Times, Lin's wife learned that Lin was alive while he was in the United States and they were reunited in the U.S. where she also earned a graduate degree before both returned to China. Lin has since become a well-published economist.

I see movie.

Tell It, Hitch..

Amen to this rant against leveraging of race and gender...

In unrelated news, Salt Lake City has been pretty nice!

Wine for Texans..

It looks like getting wine shipped directly from out of state wineries to end consumers in Texas is likely to get much easier with this ruling!

Busy Software Industry Day

Hot on the heels of the Sun/MySQL announcement, it seems Oracle is buying BEA (although I think this has been long rumored in coming). I wonder what is to become of Oracle's J2EE application server offering -- does it live on, targeted at a different market segment than WebLogic...or will they be combined?

MySQL Bought!

Wow. Sun just bought MySQL. I wonder if/how this will change their offerings? Back when I had occasion to mess with such DBs, I was partial to PostgreSQL anyway; MySQL was kind of toyish as DBs go at the time. It didn't even have subselects, and was not even fully ACID compliant, making it great to back a website, but not anything putting a premium on transactional integrity or needing more sophisticated SQL constructs. This has been addressed in more recent years, and maybe Sun's new ownership will result in MySQL moving upmarket (at least in a paid variant, perhaps).

More detail in this MySQL AB blog entry.