Tiny Planet

This, which I took while out walking, is not near my home, but is still the kind of leafy sight that greets me in the mornings (minus the shell).

Damp leaves are piling up on the front lawn and I even see the occasional flicker of frost on parked cars and shaded patches of grass. It isn’t raining, but the air holds no warmth.

Winter is back, and I’m feeling the cold more than ever before. This from a man who hails from a country the Romans once dismissed as “icy Hibernia”, and where the people were driven to savagery by the constant cold.

I wonder how much Abu Dhabi changed my physiology: I acclimatised quite well, in fact better than I had expected, thanks in part to arriving in December and so being around as the temperature climbed. But although I grew to handle 42C and even higher, I feel the chill in the mornings here. Even when the temperature is about 13C – good for this time of year – it nips a touch too much; this is a new experience for me.

I’ve found myself buying and, more importantly, wearing jumpers and the like, which I wouldn’t normally do until the dead of December. As I walked to work the other day I realised my hands were turning purple from the cold – and it wasn’t as bad as it could be.

Can one re-acclimatise to one’s native environment? Is it psychological? Did I feel all this before but am only now, with the benefit of experiencing a different climate, able to appreciate and define it?

As I write this it is 36C in Abu Dhabi and 7C in Cork. Before my departure I would never have thought that 36C would be lovely weather.

The shedding of thousands of jobs by the likes of American Express, Electronic Arts and Motorola is symptomatic of something much more worrying, according to Douglas A McIntyre.

If a recession is measured by the rapidity and breadth of job loss across huge parts of the economy, the current downturn will be unusually vicious. Even highly profitable firms are resorting to firings relatively early in what is almost certain to be  an extremely difficult cycle which could last for several quarters.

It’s regular practice for a company in a downturn to start laying off staff; this would happen if profits had fallen slightly, so you can imagine how much more drastic it could be in a recession.

What the layoff news is showing now, in what is probably the second quarter of a recession which could last for six or seven, is that large corporations believe that their revenues will get much worse and that the chance for improvement is further into the future than most companies believe that they can reasonably gaze.

With each job that is lost at a company that is doing relatively well, the probable depth of the downturn gets worse. Many of the cuts being announced now are based more on confusion and fear than on reason.

Fear indeed: Electronic Arts has revenues of $5bn and is still cutting employee numbers by 6% (admittedly I’ve since realised it made a loss of about $300m)

Meanwhile, those at the upper echelons of soccer see nothing but success in the future.

Manchester United chief executive David Gill is not convinced the credit crunch will have the catastrophic effect many pundits fear… with a new Premier League TV deal about to be negotiated, Gill feels the enduring popularity of the nation’s number one sport can take the edge off whatever impact is eventually felt.

In fairness to Gill, he does recognise that the recession will have some sort of an impact (just look at West Ham, whose owner was a banking magnate in Iceland – we all know how that turned out). However, he is confident that the Manchester United brand will pull through.

I understand where he’s coming from but I think he could be more cautious. He may be trying to promote the brand, and that’s fine, but the collapse of ITV Digital shows that signing a contract to spend hundreds of millions – and billions in the case of the Premiership – to broadcast soccer does not necessarily mean that the money will come through. Like all good businesses, Man Utd are looking to other revenue streams, such as deals in Saudi and Switzerland. But only a few clubs are this fortunate. The soccer television bubble could be the next to burst.

Hallowe’en pumpking carving with robotics (Slashdot, pic via there as well)

Looking for a Hallowe’en scare? Try the latest video games (Reuters)

Ten horror hoaxes that spooked the masses (The Daily Telegraph)

DIY Hallowe’en projects (Lifehacker)

Researchers build “haunted” room (BoingBoing)

And now time for some music.

The Misfits – Scream

Lordi – Hard rock Hallelujah

Cradle of Filth – No Time to Cry

And a horror of a different kind: Jan Terri – Losing You

East Timor have picked up their first point in international soccer with a 2-2 draw against Cambodia, six years after the side first took to the field.

“It was the first game we didn’t lose — we’re all very proud,” said long-serving, long-suffering coach Pedro Almeida, a motorcycle mechanic in the country’s sleepy capital Dili.

“We are not happy with our world ranking [bottom of the FIFA rankings] and we are hoping our players will continue to improve,” he told Reuters.

I love these little odd stories. You tend to forget about the smattering of tiny teams in Asia, and it’s nice that East Timor has something (albeit something very small) to celebrate.

I managed to keep my nose out of the company book sale today. Not much of an achievement, I hear you snort, but when you’re as compulsive about acquiring books as I am, it’s something. My head overruled my heart here: I have too many books and not enough time to read them. A small something, to be sure, but certainly out of character for me.

… can it?

In a series of tests, the businesswoman, named only as KH, was unable to pick out the tones of a whole series of well-known people including posh actress Joanna Lumley, David Beckham and ex-PM Margaret Thatcher. However, the only voice she could identify was the Scottish burr of actor Sir Sean Connery, star of James Bond hits including Dr No.

A fort near the Valley of Elah, where David is said to have slain Goliath, is shedding new light on the period when David is said to have reigned.

The city needed 200,000 tonnes of stone and it is, as yet, unclear how it relates to the persons mentioned in the biblical tale — or indeed if it has anything to do with the Israelites at all.

“This is a new type of site that suddenly opens a window on an area where we have had almost nothing and requires us to rethink what was going on at that period,” said Aren Maeir, professor of archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the director of a major Philistine dig not far from here. “This is not a run-of-the-mill find.”

The 10th century B.C. is the most controversial period in biblical archaeology because it is then, according to the Old Testament, that David united the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, setting the stage for his son Solomon to build his great temple and rule over a vast area from the Nile to the Euphrates Rivers.

But the archaeological record of that kingdom is exceedingly sparse — in fact almost nonexistent — and a number of scholars today argue that the kingdom was largely a myth created some centuries later. A great power, they note, would have left traces of cities and activity, and been mentioned by those around it. Yet in this area nothing like that has turned up — at least until now.

An enormous amount of work remains to be done, and nothing has been published on the artifacts uncovered by the archaeologists. There are also concerns about the project’s financing:  it is funded by a group that seeks “to strengthen the tie of the Jewish people to the land”.

But regardless of what is uncovered for certain, or to whom the city belonged, this is a wonderful site for work on the period. As the team has noted, there is very little evidence about the time. This means that anything that can be discovered is fantastic for historical and archaeological research and can add just a little more to the pool of human knowledge.

Have your say over at WePC.com, a joint venture by Asus and Intel that allows users to specifiy what they’d like to see in a computer. You can also draw the thing if you’re feeling creative

Some of the stuff is quite broad in aspiration: “quality display, perfect performance, huge HDD”. I wonder how one defines “perfect performance”, particularly if WIndows Vista is installed.

The site lets you balance between long battery life and a large screen, weight versus durability, performance against price and that sort of thing, so it’s impossible to, say, have one with a battery that lasts for nine hours that also has a 19-inch screen.

One of the most highly rated so far is the extensible gaming laptop, which says nuts to a long battery in favour of desktop power.

I have yet to come across the one advocating hair, though.

The kingdom is making progress, according to Emile Hokayem, a columnist for my former employer, The National.

While the hardware remains firmly in the hands of the ruling elites, the state is reasserting ownership of the “software” through gradual educational and judicial reform. Clerics are gradually losing their dominant say in courts and classrooms while the civil service and merchant class, the country’s lead reformers, are empowered.

Plainly, without the leadership of King Abdullah – whom many Saudis regret came to power too late – this progress would not have happened. At a time when his country was facing threats from radicals at home and challenges abroad, his personal credibility shifted the debate from whether the Saud family could still hold the reins of the country to whether the progress of the past few years will be sustained.

But the thrust of Hokayem’s argument is that greater Saudi independence from the United States enhances its position as a regional power and global force. Its massive oil wealth already gives it importance, but it is actively seeking friendly terms with the likes of Russia and China.

The rise of Asian consumers makes the Saudis less susceptible to leverage or pressure from their Western partners. One can already see a more evenly balanced set of “special” relationships between Saudi Arabia and its key customers, although it is doubtful that any of these new friends could provide the security guarantees that are implicit in the US-Saudi strategic partnership.

It will be interesting to see how far this political change goes, and whether Saudi can consolidate its position as a global actor.

The Peruvian faith healers have finally made their endorsement for the US presidential election: they’re backing Obama.

“Obama is growing stronger, I’ve seen that he has the spiritual support of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy to protect him,” Juan Osco, president of the Apus-Inka healers association, told The Associated Press. “He’s going to win.”

So there you have it. We can all rest easy now.