Dubai in the Diamond Business

I have to say that I'm happy to hear that Dubai is finding some modicum of success in the diamond business. I mean, that oil supply won't last forever. It might take them a bit long, though, to catch up to the Diamond Planet.

The UAE are reporting that Dubai's diamond trade topped $25 billion in the first half of 2011, a 55-percent increase over the 2010 first-six-months total haul. It's important to note, however, that the dollars increase was mostly due to a price increase. But still, the country did see an increase in production nonetheless.

It's a tough business, diamonds. Other countries already do it really, really well. But what Dubai lacks in experience it's willing to make up for in price attractiveness. See, the Russian dealers slap a 23-percent duty on their shipments, along with an 18-percent value added tax. Yes, you know the diamonds and good and ready to be worn or, more probably, kept under glass and lock and key and armed guards. But that's a lot of money to pay for something that Dubai merchants would happily offer you at just a 1-percent duty. Surely what you miss out on in terms of confidence in quality is more than made up for by the drop in overall number of dollars you spend, right? After all, how much of that Russian tack-on is really going back into the diamond production business?

Dubai is also trying to muscle in on Mumbai's territory, building its own diamond boiling center in an attempt to bypass the traditional pathway through India that most diamonds have to follow. And why not keep the precious stones at home until they're ready to be shipped? Which brings to mind the fact that most of those little (or perhaps large) stones are leaving the borders of the country for their final destination, rather than remaining at home. The same can be said of India, of course, but I would think Dubai would want to supplement its rich oil barons' families' wealth with a few more stones and few fewer luxury hotels. Then there's the fight against tradition, which holds that many rich Middle Eastern types are in love with their gold (to the extent that there are gold vending machines). 

So much uphill battle to fight, yet the UAE — and Dubai in particular — certainly have the will and the wherewithal to keep at it until they get it, whatever it in the end may be.

Shine on indeed.

Woman Gets Stolen Bike Back, by Stealing It Herself

Sometimes, the vigilante wins. 

Seems a Boulder, Colo., woman came out of a sports bar one night, expecting to find the bicycle that she had left on the sidewalk while watching a university football game, and discovered that the bike had been stolen. What to do?

Well, the woman might have gotten mad, but she certainly got even.

This woman, who at 25 is definitely is in the new wave of social media and Internet technology-savvy generations, went to Craigslist and found her bike. She knew it was hers because the "owner" had posted a photo in which she recognized the telltale handlebar tape and water bottle holder of her black Trek road bike.

Putting her detective hat on, the woman responded to the posting, seeking a test ride. The "owner," a man, granted the woman a test ride, and the woman took off — taking her bicycle back in the process.

The woman knew where the man lived and so forwarded that information to police, who arrested the man, who admitted the theft. The man, who was all of 18, had no prior record and so was released on bond. Still, he might have learned his lesson.

The police who handled the case were possibly impressed with the woman's savvy, but they did want to make it very clear to her and to the rest of us that the outcome could have very easily been of a darker variety.

Heavens! Is That a Devil We See Before Us?

Better the devil you know …

Turns out that that famous fresco showing a key scene in the life-death cycle of St. Francis of Assisi has all along contained an extra face. A prominent Italian art historian has announced his discovery of the face of a devil-like figure hidden in the clouds of Giotto's frescos, in the Basilica in Assisi. The figure, which can be seen only by peering intently at close-up photographs of the fresco, has, according to the art historian, horns atop its head and a hooked nose and knowingly sly smile on its face.

This might be one of those Rorschach test opportunities, wherein the individual viewer sees what he or she wants to see. Still, if you squint hard enough at the clouds and hold your tongue just right, you can kind of see the outline of the beginnings of what could be something that could be construed as a figure that resembles something that doesn't quite match the overall theme of the fresco.

We're talking about something that was painted a long time ago now. Giotto worked on these things in the 13th Century. We would surely know if someone had added this impish "figure" later on, so we're left with the presumption that the artist added it himself. 

Then the question becomes why. So why, then, would Giotto have included this image but then obscured it? Was it meant to be symbolic, as if the darkness was ever there, waiting for the revered to "fall"? Was it meant to be darkly ironic, as in the silver lining of the cloud was none other than eternal damnation? Was it meant to be a Da Vinci Code-esque clue, leading to an astonishing revelation that has remained hidden all these years?

A more likely explanation, according to art historians, is that the artist was profiling none other than a person for whom he had little regard. In the same way that artists often included their patrons or contemporaries in their works (think School of Athens), the same artists might often paint as unsavory characters men or women they didn't like. So who was on Giotto's hit list?

That is another story.

That Spot Should Not Have Come Out

No good deed goes unpunished.

That's the lesson that we could take away from this latest news out of Germany, that a cleaner destroyed a piece of art worth more than $1 million because it "had a stain."

See, the cleaner, who worked for an art museum in Dortmund, was doing her job. The artwork was on loan from a private collector, so it wasn't normally in the museum. The cleaner was doing her job when she removed what she thought was a stain from Martin Kippenberger's "When It Starts Dripping from the Ceilings." The artwork consisted of a bowl that the artist had discolored by water that ran over bits of wood.

To the untrained eye, it probably looked like a stain. In fact, it was a stain. But the point was that the artist wanted it to be a stain to prove a point, whatever that was.

At any rate, the artist isn't around anymore to complain. (Kippenberger died in 1997.) He is thought by many experts to be one of the most talented artists in recent German memory. But the private collector who owns the work might do a double-take the next time a museum asks for a public viewing.

No word yet on what kind of discipline that the cleaner might face.

Gaaa! No G at the Scrabble Table

G is for gi-normous, which is how big the kerfuffle was when the letter G went missing during the World Scrabble Championships recently.

It was a struggle to get the competitors to calm down after the incident, especially since after a search on and under the playing table didn't reveal the missing tile, a referee asked the players to empty their pockets! 

Scrabble is usually such a serene game, filled with periods of contemplation and reflection, permutation and calculation. Arguments tend to center on whether collections of letters are actually words and not just some sort of Dr. Seuss concoction. But when one or both players are accused of going so far beyond the bounds of decency, things can get quite heated. 

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. No punches were thrown, no fisticuffs were threatened, not a drop of blood was spilled.

The incident definitely had an international flavor. One of the players in question was from the United Kingdom; the other player in question was from Thailand. The championships are being played in Poland — Warsaw, to be precise. Surely, no one wanted an international incident.

A larger fracas was avoided when the referee placed another G on the board.

No Reason to Fear the Future: None

I'm not the paranoid type, despite what I know you're thinking about me right now. So it stands to reason that I'm not at all worried about this little news gem: A not entirely known-about government agency calling itself IARPA is looking for a few good men and women to embody the organization's slogan "Be the Future."

IARPA, for those who really want to know such things so they can sleep at night, stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. That mouthful is helpful shortened to the acronym IARPA to remind us all that it is affiliated with DARPA, the outgrowth of the U.S. Defense Department that brings us so much more than that annual competition of highly intelligent vehicles.

IARPA is hiring. And you have to really hand it to a company that can get every letter of its acronym in its logo.

So IARPA offers few readily understandable details on its website, but it certainly knows what it wants: to be the future. One of the other wants is another mouthful shortened to a helpful acronym: the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) Program. Now, even though that program title brings to mind the Future Planning Committee from In the Loop, the FUSE program is still worth worrying about because it is hugely ambitious … ambition is nothing less than a giant "data eye in the sky", the product of a million bits of information collated from traffic webcams, Google and Bing queries, targets and reports from financial markets, and random snippets of conversations recorded surreptitiously in public places during a number of weeks. I guess if you put all that together, you can build any sort of information transportation device you like and hover it in the cloud, as it were. And IARPA are doing this because they want to be ready to fight the enemies of the future, whoever (and whenever) they might be.

I'm actually shuddering as I review that previous paragraph, so let's just move on, shall we, to the Great Horned Owl Program. Now, this one sounds much better as the full name, actually, because the acronym is GHO, and the pronunciation of that one, if done properly, just doesn't bear thinking about. But the goal of this Great Horned Owl Program is to produce a silent drone. I would have thought that drones were relatively silent, given that they don't contain noisy things like people, but there you go, that's what I get for thinking out loud again, and I wouldn't want to do too much of that because I'd be overheard and my words would become part of FUSE. See, IARPA has identified as the key problem with drones the fact that they make a noise as they're approaching targets, which is probably because they contain a payload of weaponry encased in machinery and the combination of the two, when combined with the laws of physics, have no choice but to produce a sound. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good story, as Mark Twain is purported to have argued.

So, IARPA is looking for people to reprogram the cloud so it has everything everyone ever said or heard in it and keeps on building in the communications of the huddled masses and they're looking to change the laws of physics so that airborne carriers of metallicized destruction emit no sound no matter how heavy their carnage-inducing payload. The thought of both of those projects together has me reaching for the light switch so I can sit in the dark for awhile and shiver, but that's not even the half of it.

See, IARPA are looking to go Back to the Future by actually creating that device that showed Princess Leia in Star Wars. Yep, George Lucas's prescience is on display again, as the Synthetic Holographic Observation Program is on the cards and looking for funding and labor-producing volunteers, the goal being to create a synthetic holographic 3D display that can be observed and understood by people who aren't wearing a special set of goggles or able to channel The Force. The acronym for the Synthetic Observation Program, SHO, is a bit more fun because we can use it to channel Cuba Gooding Jr.: SHO me the money.

But the fact that IARPA are looking to create this sort of thing suggests to my very worried psyche that they know something that we don't, namely that the Emperor and Darth Vader are out there somewhere and the need for a Princess Leia-type message to be implanted into an R2 unit will be more current and possible than we might have first thought.

Worry is me.

Finish Marathon, Give Birth: Works for Her

You have to give it up for a woman who runs a marathon even though she's 38 weeks pregnant.

The sheer exhaustion that Amber Miller of Westchester, Ill., must have felt as she persevered through the last few miles of the Chicago Marathon puts a shudder down my spine. Her back must have been killing her, especially since she finished in an unusually (for her) slow 6 hours, 25 minutes, 50 seconds.

She took care to eat lots of food and drink lots of fluid along the way, which is good because she would have needed the extra energy after the race — when she went into labor.

Yes, the mother of one felt contractions mere moments after crossing the finish line and ended up at the hospital, enduring contractions for just a few more hours before delivering a healthy baby girl, named June, who weighed in at 7 pounds, 13 ounces.

Now, Amber didn't run the entire 26.2 miles. She had been under doctor's instructions to run only half the way, so she ran a bit, walked a bit, which is why it took her so long to finish. She finished the Wisconsin marathon earlier in the year in a time of 4:23:07. In fact, she was pregnant with June at that time as well, although the baby was only 17 weeks along at that point.

In fact, running pregnant has become something of a habit for Amber, who ran the Indianapolis Marathon two years ago in 4:30:07, while she was 18 weeks pregnant with her son, Caleb.

Distance running definitely runs in the family.