Archive for January, 2008
Forgotten World (118): Malaysia
January 9th, 2008 by Roger Darlington
Malaysia consists of two regions separated by some 640 miles of the South China Sea (the eastern section is part of Borneo) and is a federation of 13 states and three federal territories. It may be geographically close to countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but it is in a totally different place economically […]
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Forgotten World (117): Argentina
January 8th, 2008 by Roger Darlington
Argentina stretches 4,000 km from its sub-tropical north to the sub-antarctic south. It is rich in resources, has a well-educated workforce and is one of South America’s largest economies. But it has also fallen prey to a boom and bust cycle with a particularly dramatic economic collapse in 2002. There has been a recent economic […]
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Forgotten World (116): Angola
January 7th, 2008 by Roger Darlington
It’s time for another week of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World – a look at parts of the world that hardly feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 115 entries here. Angola may not figure in many western minds but, according to “The World In 2008” produced by […]
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The American presidential election (3)
January 4th, 2008 by Roger Darlington
In the first actual vote of voter opinion in the US presidential primaries, the people of Iowa have now spoken – or at least a few hundred thousand of them out of three million (although turnout was much higher than four years ago). In the Republican camp, the result was: Huckabee 34.3% Romney 25.3% Thomson […]
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What does 2008 have in common with 1945?
January 3rd, 2008 by Roger Darlington
A mathematician friend of mine with too much time on his hands has pointed out to me that 2008 is the first year since 1945 that is representable as the sum of three positive cubes in exactly two ways: 2008 = 10^3 + 10^3 + 2^3 = 1000 + 1000 + 8 2008 = 12^3 […]
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The race to the moon
January 3rd, 2008 by Roger Darlington
During this Christmas/New year break, I’m been reading a book on the space race which engulfed the United States and the then Soviet Union in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.You can read my review here. I was a young man at the time and found the whole enterprise incredibly exciting. It seemed as […]
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The American presidential election (2)
January 2nd, 2008 by Roger Darlington
Tomorrow, after months and months of campaigning, the the Democratic and Republican hopefuls for the US Presidency face their first vote in the primary race – except that the vote in Iowa tomorrow is not a primary but a caucus. Iowans will gather to discuss and vote in meetings in schools, churches, or public libraries […]
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A new year; a new device
January 1st, 2008 by Roger Darlington
For a decade now, I’ve always carried two electronic devices with me wherever I go: my mobile and my personal digital assistant (PDA). From today, no more … For my 49th birthday (June 1997) I bought myself a present. My first palm top computer – a Psion 3c with 2 megabytes of memory. Some years […]
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A new year; a new diary
January 1st, 2008 by Roger Darlington
One of the reasons why blogging comes quite naturally to me is that I’ve kept a daily diary for decades. In fact, I have an entry for every day for the last 46 years – that’s some 16,800 entries. Of course, today I start my 47th diary. Now my diary and this blog are very […]
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