Musings on the Human Condition

This is according to The Economist . Scientific contributions from the US, Britain, Germany, Japan, and France are on the decline. Canada, Italy, China and others are on the rise.

A detailed article on the above.

[DISCLAIMER: I have NO monetary relationship with IBM or any of its subsidiaries.] If you develop any serious software, I'm sure you're tired of manual steps required to collaborate among the various tools involved in the process of Agile software development. You need to take a hard look at IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) for its ability to facilitate collaboration among the multitude of tools development shops use for managing requirements, stories, code, builds, tests, deployments, issues, defects and all of the various threads that run through a large software development effort. Hint: RTC has legendary Eclipse pedigree. I've been using RTC for about a month now and strongly recommend it as a solid option for truly end-to-end Agile software development . You may be familiar with other Agile Project Management (APM) tools such as Rally . I've used Rally extensively and it's a good product. RTC, however, is in a league of its own. It has no real compe...

A plain English statement on where US tax dollars are spent. It doesn't get any simpler than this. (Even if English isn't your first language.)

Follow the instructions in this article to free up space on your main (C:) drive. Especially run this before running CRASHPLAN , which backs up your home folder by default. The home folder also happens to contain a ton of junk in the form of temp files, temporary internet files, and other e-dust. My cleanup was way overdue and ended up recovering several GB on C: drive, which is absolutely precious for the performance of your PC.

Good background reading for understanding France's willingness to consider military intervention in Libya.

This article contains an excellent set of suggestions for improving your LinkedIn profile's search engine optimization (SEO).

Are oil companies using Libya as an excuse to raise oil prices? Libya produces about 2% of the world's oil . Why should disruption in oil production from Libya cause any more than a minor blip in oil prices?

Use this site to benchmark your CPU , especially useful BEFORE you buy!

TIME magazine's list of the century's top 100 toys . I would have thought that most of these originated much later than the decades they're bracketed under.