The Decline of East and West

Maynard is in truculent mood today. he's picked-up on my Economist quote about Google, and he doesn't like what he sees.

You quote The Economist as saying: "When the two Stanford drop-outs who founded Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.......". Going to Sergey's home page, home page , likewise for Larry Page .......

It seems to me that the statements is both factually false (they both appear to be on leave-of-absence from Stanford, not drop-outs) and more importantly misleading; in that drop-out carries implications of someone who went to college for a year, spent a lot of time drinking and chasing girls and left after being unable to pass the exams. I comment on this because I think this is one more sign that the West is simply doomed. Society, and publications like The Economist pay lip-service to the idea that education is important, but when push comes to shove they're more interested in promoting ideas like randomness, luck and "sticking it to the man by following my own unorthodox path"; which is why at every opportunity they want to tell you that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are college dropouts. When something doesn't fit into the mold (Sergey and Larry, or the fact that Bill didn't exactly work his way up from the gutter but was born into the US corporate elite, and got the IBM contract that kick-started MS through his mother talking to the head of IBM [they were both on the board of the United Way]), well heck, let's omit or distort the inconvenient facts.

Well, Bill's mother and the fact that the unfortunate Gary Kildall was out flying a plane. Maynard amd I are having a discussion about ergodic and non-ergodic processes right now, whatever the subtlties of this topic the subsequent trajectories here certainly seem to have been path-dependent ones all right! The sentimental among us may like to pay a visit here . Meantime whilst Maynard laments the plight of the West, things East don't exactly fill me with joy either. Take the fact that the livelihood of millions in Japan seems to be hanging on the thread of Sony's new hand-held gaming rival for Nintendo:

Sony's plans to launch a hand-held gaming device to take-on Nintendo helped pull Tokyo shares into positive territory on Wednesday morning. The Nikkei 225 average closed up 0.4 per cent at 8,218.69 by midday, while the Topix index gained 0.3 per cent to 832.03. Sony, the electronics and media giant, managed to put its results shock behind it by announcing overnight it would launch a hand-held PlayStation gaming device to compete with Nintendo's Gameboy. Sony shares were up 3.1 per cent at Y3,010 but Nintendo stock moved in the opposite direction on the competition threat, tumbling 9.9 per cent to Y8,690.
Source: Financial Times
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