AT&T “A List” – the gift that’s not

AT&T markets a new “A List” feature…

Enjoy unlimited calls to and from the phone numbers in your A-List. Your A-List can include valid domestic phone numbers for any domestic service provider - wireless or landline.

I’ve added my corporate conference call number to my AT&T “A List”. The list already includes my home landline and, especially, the Google Voice number that connects me to Canada for free.

Once this is effective my corporate conference calls shouldn’t use any of my minutes (even toll-free calls use minutes).

Since Google Voice and Google Talk combined with the A List mean my whole family uses less than 300 minutes a month, we no longer need our family plan of 1,400. I’ve be fine with only 550 minutes.

Wow! I could drop my bill from $80 to $40. What a great feature …

Ahh. But you know there’s a hook, don’t you?

The A list feature is only available for plans with 1,400 minutes and up.

AT&T isn’t stupid. Crooked, sure. Stupid, no.

The cat brain simulator. Game over?

I used to say that the day we had a computer roughly as smart as a hamster would be a good day to take the family on the holiday you've always dreamed of.

Today, two articles, both, oddly, from The Register (emphases mine) ...

IBM lab builds computerized cat brain • The Register

... IBM said it has already simulated a cat-sized cerebral cortex — the area of the brain that's key to memory, attention, and consciousness — using a massive Blue Gene supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

This feline-scale cortical simulation, which was made with the help of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, included 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time, said Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's Cognitive Computing unit at its Almaden Research Center, in a blog post.

and from a completely different direction ...

Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers? • The Register

... According to Dean’s presentation, Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage....

The simulation, presumably, is not actually doing any cat like things. It merely represents a substrate upon which cat like intellect might operate.

So maybe the next step to the hamster-equivalent AI will be long, my prediction of singularity 2100 will hold, Kurzweil will be indeed wrong about 2045, and we really should worry about carbon emissions.

Or maybe not. In which case I hope Kashmir becomes peaceful quickly as I'd like to visit the Lakes before it's too late.

Oh, what does this have to do with Google Spanner? I'll leave that as an exercise.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes 2004: Rat brain flies plane -- organic neural network
• Gordon's Notes: Aaronson critiques Kurzweil and the 2045 Singularity
• SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity: Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed
• Gordon's Notes: Signs of the singularity: science fiction gives up
• Gordon's Notes: Imagining the Singularity in 1965…
• Gordon's Notes: The Economist predicts an early Singularity through neuroengineering
• Gordon's Notes: Singularity watch: Google maps is now smarter than me

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The paradox of 21st century prosperity

I've had a post brewing for weeks that I'm still playing with. It's not quite right, and may never be, but this Reich comment is pertinent ...

Robert Reich's Blog: Obama, China, and Wishful Thinking About American Jobs

... The dirty little secret on both sides of the Pacific is that both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment...

I'd love to see either DeLong or Krugman dig into this claim.

See also

• Gordon's Notes 2008 (another Reich article): Tipping points and GD 2.0: speculations and lessons
• Gordon's Notes 2005: David Brin on hierarchical societies
• Gordon's Notes 2005: Neo-feudalism
• Gordon's Notes 2004: Jared Bernstein & Brad DeLong on "Outsourcing": a dialog with interesting commentary
• NY Times 2009: Rich turn to concierge services to find value (and avoid fraud)

The world is going to get bigger

I don’t fly that much these days – maybe 10 flights a year. Yesterday I took one of my longer flights – from Minneapolis to San Francisco. On that flight I again thought about how the world is getting a bit bigger, and that it may get a lot bigger fairly soon.

That’s new. For most of my life the world got smaller. Air fare, especially as a percentage of average income, kept falling. Families spread out. My generation moved to take new jobs.

Air fares aren’t falling any more, and most people’s incomes aren’t rising much. When I consider increased costs of health insurance, my disposable income will be down this year – and I’ve been relatively fortunate.

On the other hand, air fare to Montreal (for example0 has more than doubled in the past nine months. The carriers reduced capacity, bought the competition, and now fly fewer but fuller planes at 2-3 times past fares.

Industry consolidation will continue to boost prices, but so will cap-and-trade carbon tax equivalents. There’s something much bigger coming though…

Energy security body calls for 'urgent' review of impact of oil shortages - Business – guardian

… Swedish academics unveiled their latest assessments of the numbers and came to even more gloomy assumptions. The study from Uppsala University entitled The Peak of the Oil Age estimated that by 2030 the world would be able to rely on only 75m barrels of oil a day, compared with the 105m forecast by the IEA.

Until relatively recently the agency was assuming the output figure would be as high as 120m and it still believes a peak of production could be reached in 2020, while Uppsala believes it might have already been reached…

I made my own “demand/supply peak light sweet” call in 2008 – in which I made wild ass claim that it would be apparent by 2015 that the demand/supply ratio for light sweet crude would cause prices to rise and crash and rise and crash their way to the $200/barrel mark (rise and crash because of secondary recessions, $200 because at that point serious conservation starts to align supply and demand).

Between some kind of carbon-tax-equivalent and “peak oil” of any form, air travel will at least double in cost over the next five years – even as profits continue to be squeezed.

That means a much bigger world to cross for the dispersed families of my generation. Maybe the next generation should stay closer to home base.

High speed rail, by the way, is looking pretty interesting.

Update 11/16/09: A follow-up article by The Guardian’s Monbiot: The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it - George Monbiot

Update 11/17/09: It occurs to me that a good measure of how real this stuff is would be to watch how very wealthy and smart people invest. I recall thatWarren Buffett recently bought some railways, and of course I'm not the only eccentric sort to make this connection ...

There are only two fixes for the Apple iPhone App Store

Good essay with links to other good essays ...

Manton Reece: The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform

... There are a lot of well-intentioned suggestions for improving the App Store, but the result will always be the same until we acknowledge the root problem. The only fix is for Apple to remove itself as gatekeeper, or let us route around them...

Apple is channeling the wrong side of 1984. Apple has become the enemy.
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Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams

I experienced this with Sprint and AT&T alike. I now pay $5 or so a month for a the honor of tracking my son's phone use -- that includes disabling his data access.

Here's Pogue's expose

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com:

...Starting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones...

...The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data...

...Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!..

...Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it’s blocked–BUT you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!...

“They have started training us reps that too many data blocks are being put on accounts now; they’re actually making us take classes called Alternatives to Data Blocks. They do not want all the blocks, because 40% of Verizon’s revenue now comes from data use. I just know there are millions of people out there that don’t even notice this $1.99 on the bill.”"

For the record, here's a list of the mobile phone scams I know of ...

1. Early termination fees that exceed plausible costs
2. The time eating pointless answering machine messages
3. The "accidental" high priced data fees
4. The surprise fees and taxes with just about any transaction
5. The covert contract renewal with service changes
6. Recipient pays SMS transaction fees
7. The unusable cash card rebate fraud (AT&T settled with NY state on this one)
8. Uninterpretable cell phone bills.
9. Passive revenue from OAN Services and other cramming scams.
10. Unblockable SMS marketing.
11. Long distance interconnect fees.

Add them up and were talking billions of dollars in fraud. These scams didn't have to be planned out, all you need is fertile soil for emergent fraud.

See also:

• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Regional airlines, emergent fraud and enlightenment 2.0
• 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam
• John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card
• AT&T “A List” – the gift that’s not
• A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone
• The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated
• Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies
• Phone company posted rates are completely meaningless
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show

Update 11/17/09: More on how complexity attacks are used by mobile phone companies (and, incidentally, by health care insurance plans).

• Why Economists Love to Study Cellphone Pricing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
• Looking for a Method in Cellphone Price Madness - NYTimes.com

Update 10/4/10: Verizon gets caught.

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I add the despised comment captcha

I dislike Captcha (usually a text recognition test) as much as anyone -- but lately my email has been clogged with notices of blog comments to review. They're almost all spam.

So I had to turn on the Captcha test. If the spambots get bored I'll try turning it off again.

About that health care bill …

Joseph Paduda despairs ….

… I'm really disappointed with the Republicans. They are supposed to be the budget hawks, but instead they've spent their time railing against abortion funding, illegal immigrants, and death panels, along with scientific research and taxes on device manufacturers. Instead of attempting to govern responsibly, they've abandoned all morality in their quest to re-energize the lunatic fringe of their once-dominant party…

… While there's plenty of blame to pile at the door of the Republicans, it is the Democrats who are to blame for coming up with a huge entitlement program set up to do nothing but grow…

Well, yes.

The GOP decided that their one and only mission was to make Barack Obama look bad. That meant this bill would attract no more than 1-2 GOP rebels. That in turn meant no constituency could be offended, which meant no serious efforts to control costs.

If we had a less dysrational electorate, then we’d have a better GOP. But we’re stuck with the GOP we’ve got.

So any bill that can pass will give everyone everything they want.

It’s not even lying. Anyone capable of perceiving reality knows there will be a reckoning. This is about building the arena for the real battle to come.

Not pretty, but that’s modern America. It’s the best we can do, and it’s much better than nothing. In stage II, assuming we get this sausage made, we’ll be talking price.

Reason – it’s more than IQ

Temperament is what you’re born with. Character is what life does with temperament.

Things aren’t so clear with intelligence. It’s very likely that one’s maximal “IQ performance” is largely determined by genes and intrauterine environment, but even so we know that IQ measurements increase with test training. More than that, there are lots of smart people who seem unable to reason rationally.

Reason is more than IQ …

Rational and Irrational Thought- The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss- Scientific American

• Traditional IQ tests miss some of the most important aspects of real-world intelligence. It is possible to test high in IQ yet to suffer from the logical-thought defect known as dysrationalia.
• One cause of dysrationalia is that people tend to be cognitive misers, meaning that they take the easy way out when trying to solve problems, often leading to solutions that are illogical and wrong.
• Another cause of dysrationalia is the mindware gap, which occurs when people lack the specific knowledge, rules and strategies needed to think rationally.
• Tests do exist that can measure dysrationalia, and they should be given more often to pick up the deficiencies that IQ tests miss.

I’m excited by this analysis. I’d have more to say but the full article isn’t available online yet and I can’t find much extended commentary.

I can note that analyses of errors in reasoning are very old – at least as old as Greek analyses of rhetoric. In the 1970s and 1980s several excellent books on medical reasoning and diagnosis characterized common errors of cognition, and in the early 1990s my CogSci grad coursework plumbed the depths. We’ve developed an extensive language for talking about errors in reasoning.

Even so, this recent article’s explicit study of the persistently dysrational (a better term than “arational” or “dysreasonal”) feels like a useful way to reframe the discussion. From Bush to Rumsfeld to Climate change deniers we’ve seen some fairly smart to brilliant people stuck in dysrational modes. If we can understand what produces dysrationalia, and how to intervene in early life, we may take a big step towards enlightenment 2.0 and rational discourse though not universal agreement.

See also: Be the Best You can Be- IQ and reasoning - not quite the same thing

The ultimate take down of the disgraced Levitt and Dubner

The intelligentsia have been engaged for weeks in a ferocious competition to best capture the intellectual and moral vacuity of Levitt and Dubner's latest money churner.

Today, by acclaim, we have a winner -- “SuperFreakonomics” and climate change : The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert. The smashing finale left no doubt ...

... To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

These men traded their reputations for wealth. A worthy trade for them, but they're not paying for the collateral damage

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Next up: AAFP to endorse e-cigarettes

I had a real bad feeling when the American Academy of Family Physicians closed our once excellent web site to public access. So I wasn’t all that surprised by their latest move …

How the World Works – Family Doctors go better with Coke - Salon.com

… directed to this story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer reporting that the American Association of Family Doctors has "a six-figure grant from the Coca-Cola Co. to create content about beverages and sweeteners for the academy's consumer Web site, FamilyDoctor.org."…

… From the AAFP press release: “The Consumer Alliance program is a way of working with interested companies to develop educational materials to help consumers make informed decisions so they can include the products they love in a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle," said AAFP President-elect Lori Heim, M.D., of Vass, N.C…

…The Consumer Alliance program also will create a new source of funding for AAFP, which, in recent years, has broadened its search for funding outside the pharmaceutical industry…”

I just sent these guys over $600 for my 1 year membership – to find out that the AAFP’s consumer health site is doing covert marketing. Next up – the health benefits of e-cigarettes.

Worst bit? Maybe this is an improvement over pharmaceutical funding.

I expect this will be my last year of AAFP membership.

Update: I received a standard response letter signed by AAFP President Lori Heim when I wrote the academy. It included a bit of further context ...

... I would finally note that this is not new territory for the AAFP. Over the past 4 years we have had funding relationships with Pepsi and McDonald's for support of the AIM program - and we have managed them very well in maintaining a positive image for the Academy while advancing our message about fitness, activity, and healthy choices. And Coca-Cola has been a corporate member of our Foundation for several years as well which is why we reached out to them initially.

So why not Philip Morris? These are publicly traded companies -- their mission is not public health. Their mission is to make money from people who buy Pepsi, Coke and McDonald's products.

The AAFP needs a reform agenda. It can't afford to live in the style it's grown accustomed to, so the AAFP needs to radically downsize.

Dems for a rationalist GOP - is there somewhere to donate?

Krugman is very worried about the 2010 triumph of the Tea Party ...

Op-Ed Columnist - Paranoia Strikes Deep - NYTimes.com

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied...

...In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster...

Krugman is not always right. Unfortunately, he's the best prognosticator we've got, even if he's better at forecasting doom than at coming up with practical alternatives (perhaps because we don't have a lot of practical options).

We can't make Palin/Bachman go away, because their constituency is right be afraid. Even if Bachman had lost her Minnesota seat (she almost did, it was surprisingly close) someone else would have taken her raving loon position.

Instead of focusing on the crazies we should be trying to build a Reason-based GOP. Liberal democracies need a dynamic tension between the genetically gifted and the neurotypical, between those who inherit wealth and those who inherit struggle, between the market and the wise, between the thrusting and the compassionate. If the powerful do not get their extra votes, they will crash the system (to their own detriment, but the powerful are not often insightful).

A rationalist GOP won't have my values of tolerance and compassion. It will, however, have a calculated interest in the survival of American (if not human) civilization, in educating productive workers, in reducing unprofitable and uncontrollable wars, and in clean air, water, and even beautiful spaces.

I wouldn't vote for or admire a rationalist GOP, but I would understand and respect its necessity. Without this kind of opposition, without the struggle for power, my Dem party will become a sewer of corruption (No, it's not a sewer yet. If you think it is you've led a protected life).

Today Newt Gingrich is the closest thing to a rationalist GOP -- which is pathetic. As feeble in Reason as he is, he's also powerless and all but forgotten.

We need to rebuild a post-Reagan rationalist GOP -- or we'll be governed by the likes of Palin and Bachman and human civilization will be a smoldering wreck.

Where do we start donating?
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Smart Smoker e-cigarette: From China without regulation

In the past 2-3 days I've noticed advertisements for "smart smoker" in several of the media sources I read including the NYT.

I haven't seen anything like this for years. Heck, I'd thought these ads were disallowed in the US.

Turns out these are "e-cigarettes", a drug delivery system that's marketed as reducing second hand smoke and as "legal to smoke anywhere". They are currently legal to advertise in the US, but not legal to import.

They are manufactured in China, and first become popular in the UK, where they've emerged from a "regulatory gap". The vendor web sites strongly imply these are "safer" than traditional cigarettes; that's not implausible per nicotine dose unit but it's certainly untested. They don't claim that they're "safer" than bungee jumping.

So how does one figure out who's behind these expensive ads (and, as it turns out, huge lobbying, marketing and legal initiatives)? In this case, Google is not a friend. Simple searches turn up vast numbers of results from a mixture of pro-smoking groups, retailers and spam blogs. A smoke screen, as it were.

On the other hand, scholar.google.com and PubMed have almost nothing on "e-cigarette" or "electronic cigarette". This has come on too quickly for public health and research to respond.

My best source to date has been a single June 2009 NY Times article, which I only found by restricting my Google search to site:nytimes.com. That's where I learned this innovation was made in China. The "smoke" is inhaled propylene glycol, an antifreeze component (see also poisoned toothpaste (Chinese diethylene glycol). Emphases mine:

Cigarettes Without Smoke, or Regulation - June 2, 2009 - NYTimes.com

FALL RIVER, Mass. — During 34 years of smoking, Carolyn Smeaton has tried countless ways to reduce her three-pack-a-day habit, including a nicotine patch, nicotine gum and a prescription drug. But stop-smoking aids always failed her.

Then, having watched a TV infomercial at her home here, Ms. Smeaton tried an electronic cigarette, which claimed to be a less dangerous way to feed her addiction. The battery-powered device she bought online delivered an odorless dose of nicotine and flavoring without cigarette tar or additives, and produced a vapor mist nearly identical in appearance to tobacco smoke.

... the Food and Drug Administration has already refused entry to dozens of shipments of e-cigarettes coming into the country, mostly from China, the chief maker of them, where manufacture began about five years ago. The F.D.A. took similar action in 1989, refusing shipments of an earlier, less appealing version, Favor Smoke-Free Cigarettes.

“These appear to be unapproved drug device products,” said Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the agency, “and as unapproved products they can’t enter the United States.”

But enough of the e-cigarettes have made their way into the country that they continue to proliferate online and in the malls.

For $100 to $150 or so, a user can buy a starter kit including a battery-powered cigarette and replaceable cartridges that typically contain nicotine (though cartridges can be bought without it), flavoring and propylene glycol, a liquid whose vaporizing produces the smokelike mist. When a user inhales, a sensor heats the cartridge. The flavorings include tobacco, menthol and cherry, and the levels of nicotine vary by cartridge.

Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, and also to create artificial smoke or fog in theatrical productions. The F.D.A. has classified it as an additive that is “generally recognized as safe” for use in food. But when asked whether inhaling it was safe, Dr. Richard D. Hurt, director of the Nicotine Dependence Center at the Mayo Clinic, said, “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure anyone knows for sure.”

Of the e-cigarettes themselves, Dr. Hurt added: “We basically don’t know anything about them. They’ve never been tested for safety or efficacy to help people stop smoking.”

Public health officials also worry that the devices’ fruit flavors, novelty and ease of access may entice children.

“It looks like a cigarette and is marketed as a cigarette,” said Jonathan P. Winickoff, an associate professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children and chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium. “There’s nothing that prevents youth from getting addicted to nicotine.”

Sales and use of electronic cigarettes are already illegal on safety grounds in Australia and Hong Kong, and some other countries regulate them as medicinal devices or forbid their advertising. So far the United States has focused only on stopping them at the border, although Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, has asked the drug agency to take them off the market until they can be tested.

Distributors of electronic cigarettes fear that a bill making its way through Congress that would give the F.D.A. the authority to regulate tobacco could be used to put them out of business as well. The bill has passed the House and could be taken up by the Senate this week.

The only American study of electronic cigarettes, now under way at Virginia Commonwealth University and financed by the National Cancer Institute, deals not with the kind of safety questions raised by propylene glycol but rather with the amount of nicotine processed by the bodies of the products’ users.

Another study, conducted this year at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and financed by Ruyan, an electronic cigarette company, shows that users typically receive 10 percent to 18 percent of the nicotine delivered by a tobacco cigarette...

So what we have here is a novel unregulated drug delivery system involving inhaled propylene glycol that is manufactured in China, a nation famous for the quality and regulation of its regulated Heparin supply. It is perfectly designed for sale to children and to Darwin award wannabes.

The good news is that the GOP no longer controls the FDA. That doesn't mean we can go back to sleep. The GOP will be back, and with Palin and Bachman in control it will be worse than ever. This beast needs to be driven back into its cage.

See also:

• Poisoned Toothpaste from China: this would be a good time to start freaking out
• Poisoned medicine: Even I am stunned.
• FDA and Public Health Experts Warn About Electronic Cigarettes
• Toxic heparin was fraud, not accident
• China's water army and my e-cigarette post

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Forgotten things - Gypsies and Indians

My father remembers Indians in the 1920s rowing from Oka across the Lake of Two Mountains in birch canoes to sell small handmade toy birch canoes in Regaud Quebec.

My mother remembers Gypsies selling handmade clothes pegs in Manchester in the 1930s. Once she and her sister were home alone when the Gypsies called. They hid beneath a table, for they knew the Gypsies stole children and raised them as their own.

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Angela Merkel's second crossing

I don't often wish for access to a TV, but this I'd like to see ...

Berlin's moment of freedom that turned world history | World news | The Guardian

...Later that night, a young East German scientist called Angela Merkel walked across the same crossing. Now the chancellor of united Germany, she will do the same again this afternoon, accompanied by a group of East German opposition activists, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and doubtless a media scrum."...

I knew Angela Merkel was Chancellor of course, but I'd forgotten that she was born in East Germany. She crossed over on the day East Germany was freed.

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