The Economist - December 31, 2011 mobi torrent

The Economist

December 31st 2011

Digital highlights, December 31st 2011
Dec 28th 2011, 14:20 by The Economist online

Mystery theatre
Dandong, a Chinese town on the Yalu river, ordinarily bustles with trade across its bridges to North Korea. In the week after Kim Jong Il’s death, traders were joined by Korean mourners, Western spooks and the odd journalist, all hoping for a peek inside the enigma to the south

A bibliophile in Paris
Over the 60 years since George Whitman bought his shop on the left bank of the Seine with inherited money, an estimated 40,000 travellers and would-be writers have slept among the books, on makeshift beds or the floor in his “socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore”

The birth of scientifiction
“Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660\", a novel serialised in 12 parts in Modern Electrics, is a century old. This important, badly written book has a good claim to be the first work of what its author, a struggling inventor called Hugo Gernsback, called “scientifiction”

United States: Ron Paul in Iowa
The candidate’s support will erode as he faces the scrutiny afforded to front-runners. If he does win, it will be a squeaker

Science and technology: Babbage awards - TO COME
We celebrate the most weirdly wonderful research to grace our pages in 2011

Europe: Hungary off the air
The closing down of a popular talk-radio show adds to concerns about freedom of the press

Africa: Bloody Christmas
What is Boko Haram, the Islamist sect that claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombs in Nigeria on December 25th?

Europe: The bourgeois revolutionaries
A correspondent spends a day with Moscow’s growing opposition movement

Science and technology: Powerpointless
The decline of the keynote address at a big technology trade show illustrates the story of an industry

Asia: Disobeying the Nursultan
The oil town of Zhanaozen has been living under a curfew since an outbreak of violence there left at least 14 dead

United States: Newt Hampshire
A slideshow looks at the early, somewhat chaotic, days of the Gingrich campaign

Science and technology: Thinking big
Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, wants to build the world’s largest aeroplane, from which to launch a private spaceship

Culture: Make things with your hands
Terence Conran, a designer, talks about the importance of paper and pencil

Economics: The dating game
Put your assumptions about real GDP growth, inflation and the uan/dollar exchange rate into this interactive chart to determine when China’s economy will become bigger than America’s