Behind the Scenes: The cloud in cloud computing requires extensive data centers. Most of us don’t think about the infrastructure of how Google can get search results to your desktop in 0.15 seconds multiplied by millions of users every minute.
Economics: Alex discusses idiot taxes and the price of HDMI cables. I have been surprised by the same phenomenon with regard to Apple iPod chargers and headphones. Deals can be found online sometimes, but almost never in retail stores. Why is that?
Big Picture: Innovation is a hot topic in business circles for a while now. Jeff Jarvis writes thoughtfully about how the innovations of the last few years have acted differently from innovations in prior years. Previously, business innovations created increases in GDP, things like the Personal Computer and the ShamWow that consumers bought and companies derived income from. Lately, some of the most important innovations, Craigslist and Google included, reduced corporate income (macro), but increased personal wealth (micro). This is critical because reporting on our economic progress have been focused on macro trends for many years. We need to develop alternative measures to accurately report on our progress.
by is pretty impressive. Here is one of my favorites:
, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. The idea is that we need to have some sense of numbers before we can make rational decisions. The book is broken up into chapters like Count, Size and Average. In each, the authors try to show how a little thinking can help us understand what we read and how people can use numbers to confuse. On a related point, the Freakonomics blog today talks about why it may be 
, spoke at a recent EG conference. EG is an offshoot of the TED conference. Dan’s topic was about 
. In the article, he has an excerpt of the book,