This is all Hulu's fault. Daily episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are entertaining but you, dear readers, are the ones who suffer.

Console yourselves with the tales of John McCain's worst week ever. Having goaded Obama into making a global tour in the hopes of his "foreign policy inexperience" leading to a major gaffe, it turns out that everybody in the world loves Obama. Especially the Iraqi prime minister, who endorsed Obama's plans to withdraw from Iraq. And you know who really loves Obama? The disproportionately black US military, that's who. Especially when he tries out their basketball court and sinks a 3-pointer on the first try. Talk about unnecessarily good.

McCain, meanwhile, stayed at home and did all the foreign-policy flubbing instead. He referred to Russia's relationship with Czechoslovakia, a country that ceased to exist back in 1992, a mistake he's been making since the 2000 campaign. He also referred to the Iraq/Pakistan border. It may be that he's being incredibly clever here, and he was subtly referring to Iran, which is what actually lies between Iraq and Pakistan, but it's a lot more likely that he's just old.

The icing on McCain's week was probably his plan to upstage Obama's speech in Berlin by having a press conference about opening up offshore oil drilling in the US with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, on an oil rig near New Orleans. McCain claims offshore drilling will have an immediate impact on gas prices (even though the experts say the impact will not be felt until 2030 and will be "insignificant") and also that it is "safe enough these days". However, the campaign cancelled the conference, blaming it on nearby Hurricane Dolly -- but the more likely reason is that an oil tanker has collided with a barge, causing a massive oil spill just outside New Orleans.

This election is beginning to look like a walkover.

Ten(ish) days in Barbados, baby. See you when I get back!

In part 1 I explained what we have right now: social networks and crowd processors. I then expanded on the future of social networks. Now let's talk about the future of crowd processors, which I called "social software" before. To be more usefully specific, let's give this software its own name:

Social processor

Software the creates value for its users by utilizing their social networks.

Social processors are combinations of the two existing types of social software, social networks and crowd processors. This solves two problems:

1. Social networks don't do anything. They collect data about your social graph and then... nothing.*
2. Crowd processors (see previous post) do a lot of processing, but their recommendations often throw up combinations that are strange or impersonal.

How crowd processors work

Crowd processors do a ton of processing on all their members to calculate recommendations of various types. They take two approaches:

1. calculate global recommendations, e.g. the Amazon Best Sellers list: the first-pass approach, this quickly begins to fall down as membership grows, since you get a "lowest common denominator" effect: your food network begins to recommend McDonald's, your music network recommends you try Justin Timberlake, and Amazon recommends whatever Oprah is reading this week. This is an equivalent to the social paralysis problem in social networks: only the stuff that offends no-one can be recommended to everybody.
2. calculate similarity recommendations, e.g. Amazon's "customers who bought X also bought Y": this is the current standard approach, and involve 4 steps:
   • look at everything you've said you like, A
   • find the people, B, who also like A
   • find all the other things, C, that people in B like
   • from C, subtract the things that everybody likes, to get distinctive results
   The last step can vary a lot in sophistication, and that determines how good the application is at recommending stuff that's really related to you. This is the tricky part, and it's seldom perfect.

What will social processors do?

The problem with both approaches taken by crowd processors is that they are an approximation to the real world. In the real world, you discover things you like from your friends, and the more of your friends who like something, the more likely you are to hear about it. Equally important, the closer you are to somebody -- the stronger your connection -- the more likely you are to be interested in their recommendations.

Therefore, social processors will use the data about your social connections -- gleaned from an existing social network, not a new one -- to calculate recommendations from your social circle, and only your social circle. A partial example of this is GoodRec, who can recommend things based only on your friends' recommendations. Although they currently require you to create a new friend network (or guess one inaccurately from your GMail address book), they could easily get it from, say, MySpace's Data Availability program (assuming your friends are on mySpace).

Why is this so much better?

Think recommendations only from people you already know sounds a little limiting? Far from it. This is how the world already works. Your taste in food is based on what people have fed you, or eaten around you. Your taste in clothes is based, even if only subconsciously, on what the people you interact with daily are wearing. The same is true for books, movies, music, even political ideology. The difference between this way and a crowd processor's way is no false positives. Have eclectic taste in friends? Then you'll get wacky recommendations. Are your friends adventurous musically? Then chances are you are too, and you'll get their new stuff. The fundamental point here is that you are like your friends. That's why they're your friends. And the humans work, the longer you know your friends and the closer you are to them, the more like them you become.

But if this is how the world works now, why bother with software at all? Because in the real world, communication of preferences and interests and consumption is ad-hoc and incomplete. You don't start every conversation with everybody you know by asking them for an exhaustive list of the TV, movies, music and books they're consuming and their opinions of each -- although each of these things are popular topics of conversation. You can get the network to do the work for you, and when that happens, new things that are popular will spread incredibly quickly.

This is why it's important that social processors not attempt to create their own networks to work with. The network it uses has to be complete and detailed, with nuances such as lengths of friendships** and frequency of interaction (do you exchange messages all the time? Then you're probably close). It's not just tiresome to do this over and over, it's a critical stumbling block. Social data is a key part of recommendations, and if you have crappy data you'll get crappy results. It is essential that a social processor use real, accurate, detailed data.

Okay smartypants, so what does it all mean?

So if this is where social software is going to go, how do we jump on the bandwagon and make money? If I knew, I'd be doing it already, I guess, but some general tactics that I think seem promising are:

• Build a social network: by far the riskiest approach, as this space is approaching saturation. Unless you've got a really, really good user interface and a much more detailed social graph that would make you simultaneously more attractive to users and developers, this is probably unlikely to work.
• Build on top of a social network: this is the next-best thing. For the love of god, if you've got social software that you're building right now, please do not demand that I "create my profile" and "invite my friends". I've done that a thousand times. Let me enter my Facebook or MySpace credentials and get that information from them.
• Again with the interoperability: even better, build on top of every social network. And since that involves a lot of implementation, I repeat my conclusion from the first half: the people who crack making social networks interoperable will make money hand over fist.

* MySpace attempts to solve this by being about music. Facebook attempts to solve it by introducing Facebook Apps, but it turns out they're mainly about wasting time, because nobody wants to run a business inside of Facebook.

** Ever wonder why Facebook asks you when you met somebody?

Just a little too busy/tired to blog. Luckily, Twitter and the linklog can keep you entertained.

The various news outlets have been competing recently to publish the most presidential-looking photos of Obama they can find.

Get used to hearing that, people. Because you're gong to be hearing about it a lot.

Hillary Clinton's historic but ultimately flawed campaign is finally over, and thank god. Now time to start creaming McCain. And with his awful, awful speeches and even worse policies, that's not going to be too hard.

Big update: a summary of tonight's speeches:

McCain

Awkwardly and falteringly delivered, with bad intonation and creepy fake smiles, to a very small room half-filled by an elderly white audience -- in New Orleans, so I guess the white folks were bussed in from Mississippi. (Seriously: no black people in the room? In New Orleans?) In the background, an unflattering green backdrop reveals a new slogan: "A Leader We Can Believe In".

This speech -- and that crowd -- was an excellent indication of why democrats are going to win in November. McCain's campaign is a shambles, disorganized and demoralized. Its candidate is out of touch and unlikeable. This is another Dole candidacy, and that's great news for Obama. The campaign is so adrift they scheduled McCain to speak 20 minutes before Obama started speaking, leaving McCain to get cut off literally in mid-sentence to announce Obama's nomination. Even the new slogan is terrible. Like Hillary's grating "Yes We Will" chant, adopting an awkward re-wording of your opponent's successful slogan merely underlines just how bereft of new ideas your campaign really is.

Hillary

"Whoops, I didn't get the presidency! Shit! And I'm personally out $11m, so, uh... make me Vice President, because I really won! Seriously! I got the popular vote, if you don't count the states that didn't vote for me! And remember to keep donating, because I'm gonna be really broke if you don't!"

The reason Hillary isn't dropping out, by the way, is because the rules say she can't continue to raise money to pay off her debt if she drops out of the race. Her campaign is in $21m worth of debt, so the only way to get her money back is to give her hard-core fans false hope that she will stay in, and take it to the convention, or maybe get the VP slot, or something, whatever, as long as they keep donating. As soon as she breaks even she will drop out. I don't think she seriously expects to get the VP nod, in the same way that I don't think she seriously has expected to win for quite some time. She just didn't have a good exit strategy (and still doesn't).

Obama

What is there to say? The man knows how to give a speech. It was no Yes We Can (New Hampshire), no Change is Coming to America (Iowa), and certainly no 2004 DNC speech. But it was still eloquent, and passionate, and sincerely delivered by a candidate who I truly believe wants what's best for the United States and the world and has good plans, practical plans for making it happen.

The reason I love Obama as a candidate is because I believe in him. I believe in him without cynicism, knowing that while he isn't perfect he is genuine. A political candidate that I trust so deeply is unprecedented in my short life of following politics, and it is refreshing and inspiring to me and many others of my generation to be able for once to put aside cynicism and sarcasm and truly unreservedly support a cause. I love Obama for giving me that opportunity.

And now, for the first time in my life, the good guy, the guy who should have won, is the guy who did win, and he gets to fight the general election and has a good chance of becoming one of the most powerful leaders in the world. That's a wonderful thing.

P.S. If you agree, why not volunteer or donate?

A bunch of thoughts have been buzzing around in my head recently about social software: what it is, where it's going, and what that means. I'm going to try and get those thoughts in order here. First, as is always useful, some definitions:

Social networks

These are characterized by one-to-one, personal, long-term connections. They are used primarily for communication and/or contact-management. All the usual culprits are here: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr; plus myriad others less familiar to my audience: Hi5, Ning, Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil), etc..*

Crowd processors

These are many-to-one: they take data gathered from the behaviour of large groups of people and process it into something that is useful to you. One-to-one contacts may exist, but they are not the primary benefit of the service. This is where you find Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Yelp.

Social software

This is many-to-many, and is essentially a combination of the other two. It uses data from social networks to process data from those groups to derive value. It's my opinion that this is the holy grail: this is how real human beings work; their lives are a reflection of their community. It's also my opinion that not many of these exist yet, although various apps are getting there: Facebook and Twitter are approaching it from the social side, Last.fm and Amazon from the crowd processor angle.

There is a bunch to talk about here, so I'm splitting these up. First, let's tackle social networks. A lot of people are sceptical of socnets as the Next Big Thing, having seen the initial success of Friendster and its demise, followed by MySpace, followed by Facebook: if everybody keeps abandoning their socnet for the next new popular one, surely the whole industry is just a fad too?

Rapid growth, and limits to growth

A widely-held idea about socnets, fuelled by the fact that they often get so popular so quickly, is that there is going to be some sort of "winner": that one network will finally be good enough, have exactly the right mix of features and privacy, and it will grow until everyone is a member and abandons all competing networks. This is not going to happen. Social networks have a natural size limit determined by a number of competing forces:

1. Positive: virality: Metcalfe's law, more commonly known as the "network effect", says that as more people join a network, the number of possible connections between them increases exponentially. This tends to make a network more useful the more people who join. This is why social networks are intrinsically viral.
2. Positive: address book effect: It's nice to have a single big list of everybody you could ever want to contact. At a certain point you begin to add people reflexively. This is great for the size of the network, but bad for the usefulness -- see the next two point.
3. Negative: overload: Dunbar's number, the hypothetical limit to the number of people you can really "know" at one time, is somewhere around 150. If you have more than 100 "friends" on a social network, they are not really "friends". They're people you used to be in touch with, or met once but don't know very well, or are trying to hit on or do business with. Beyond 150 people, the value of knowing what those other people are up to tails off -- because you don't care.
4. Negative: social paralysis: the more people who can see what you're up to, the less you can actually do. Stuff that you'd talk about and pictures that you'd post for your friends to see are not what you want your parents to see or your work colleagues to know about. The key point is that nobody has just one personality, they have several, and social networks do not currently have a good way to manage this.

This is why people went from MySpace to Facebook to LinkedIn to insert-socnet-here: they aren't deleting those other accounts; they are instead striking different balances between these forces to suit themselves: using one network for their friends, maybe a different one for family, one to keep track of what people are doing, one as an address book. They're also trying to make walls between their different personalities and interests: one place they talk about their hobby, one place for relationships, one for their crazy S&M fetish group.

Partitioning is the next hard problem

People will have multiple online social networks because people have multiple social circles in real life. The sooner socnets themselves learn to accept this and work with it instead of against it, the happier everyone will be. The future of social networks is that everyone will have a few, and they will mainly be small. The "address book" network will be huge, but you probably don't want to be that network: it will be dull because of high levels of social paralysis, and also a victim of constant hacking and spam, because the biggest user database makes you the juiciest price.

Socnets are not unaware of the problem of identity and partitioning, of course. Yahoo! for a long time allowed users to create "aliases", separate usernames with different profile pictures and privacy levels, that they could use selectively across various Yahoo! properties (they proved cumbersome and confusing, and have been phased out in favour of just letting people have lots of different usernames, which is what they were doing anyway). Facebook and several others have Groups, which allow you to sort your friends into categories that you can contact and invite to events as a group; this solves only part of the partitioning problem -- the easy part.

There are a bunch of much harder problems still to be solved around partitioning. Feel free to base your startup around one or all of these:

• Selective data portability: want to use the same profile picture on two different socnets? It should be as easy as entering your password but not automatic -- you don't want your S&M profile photo turning up on Facebook (or do you...?).
• Friend discovery: on joining a new socnet, it should be possible to find your friends from other socnets. This is a thorny problem, because if the network in question is that S&M club, they might not want to be findable -- and that should be an option.
• Identity verification: is this person the Stephen Colbert, a Stephen Colbert, or fake Stephen Colbert? And how do you prove it?
• Alerts and messages: if you join twenty different socnets -- not unreasonable for a person with varied interests and an active social life -- you end up with 20 different inboxes in addition to your email box, each with their own UI and bugs. Ugh! A unified messaging platform is key.
• Handling Dunbar's number: oh no, too many connections! A sea of irrelevant status updates! An app that works out who you actually care about and filters by the strength of your social connections will do well: a basic example being Twitter's web-only vs SMS functionality, but look for something more subtle.

Let a thousand socnets bloom

So what are the key conclusions to be drawn here:

• No big winner, lots of also-rans. Not just "not one of these guys", no big winner, ever. It will be a classic long tail situation: a few big players, and then thousands of smaller players adding up to just as many users.
• To succeed, partition yourself. LinkedIn is a great example of how to do this: choose one type of social circle, and build tools specially for those people. MySpace arguably does something similar for music lovers, but I hate MySpace and hope somebody else trounces them (Last.fm are still too data-focussed).
• White labellers will do well. The best-known of these is Ning, but there are a ton of companies working to provide generic social networking software for you to create your own social network. These guys will do a lot of business, but the size of these networks will be very limited: past a certain level, a custom network like LinkedIn with specific features for that group will do better. (Which is why people will never really use Facebook for dating; even if they have smaller pools of users, dating sites have better tools)
• The Next Big Thing in social networking will interoperability. Generic social networks are pretty much already here on a regional basis; there's not much room for more. All five of the hard problems above are about gluing the networks together.

* I'm not going to talk about Friendster much. Friendster failed for technical reasons, so it's not really interesting.

After being aggressively targeted by ads on Facebook, I eventually gave in and clicked on NoMoreDates, a service that professes to use advanced matching algorithms to find the people perfect for you. They make a big deal about being specifically about over-25, urban, professional types (hence the targetting on Facebook, one of the few places that can reliably distinguish to that level of detail). It's also specifically for people who are looking for something long-term, hence the name.

You sign up, and fill in an exhaustive, hour-long survey about your personality, interests and temperament. You can do it in stages -- I did the first 10 minutes about a month ago, then finally was bored enough to finish it off tonight. At the end of all that, it was finally ready to search its database:

You have no matches.

Yes, I know. That's the problem you're supposed to be solving.

It's been that kind of week (and it's only been 2 days of week so far).

I know it's kind of ridiculous to chime in on the ongoing bitchmeme about Twitter vs. Friendfeed vs. Google Reader(?) vs. Pownce but whatever, it's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.

Let me be clear: nothing is going to kill Twitter because no currently existing service competes with it. I don't mean "they're not as good", I mean nobody is doing what Twitter does, and the sooner people realise this and shut the fuck up the sooner I will stop screaming at my iPhone as I read Techmeme.

What does Twitter provide that nobody else does?

1. SMS updates
2. IM updates
3. An XMPP (jabber) gateway

The first and last of these are not convenient extras, these are the absolute foundation and the bright future of Twitter and why it is so useful, so flexible and so popular.

SMS is the foundation of Twitter

The most important, far and away the most important feature of Twitter is its SMS aggregation feature. It drives me insane that people don't seem to get this. Twitter doesn't require mobile Internet access. It works on all mobile devices already. It gets better the better your phone, but this fact means that as a mobile communications platform its install base is 100% of mobile phone users, which is practically everybody, a market at least 5 times bigger than the market with even the most basic access to the mobile web, and more than a hundred times larger than the market of users of iPhone, currently the only device to provide a mobile web browsing experience that is anything but painful.

Any communications platform is powered by the long tail. For every A-list blogger with 10,000 twitter followers there are 10,000 random users who use Twitter to communicate with three or four close friends, and they are doing it on their phones because if they wanted to do it on the web there are a hundred ways to do that already. Pownce is not filling any need whatsoever. Pownce is just a really short Tumblr, and Tumblr is just a really quick Blogger, and you don't need it to be any quicker unless you get some extra utility out of it, like Twitter provides.

But it's the sheer size of the market that makes Twitter, potentially at least, absolutely staggeringly powerful. Mobile phone penetration in the developed world is 100%. Not "100% of web users": 100% of people. And the developing world has phones too. More people can use Twitter than can use the web, and even though realistically very few of them will, it underlines the fact that you have to stop thinking about Twitter as some kind of web 2.0 service. Twitter is not the web; it's global mobile communication for ad-hoc groups, and that's a whole different beast. Friendfeed isn't any kind of competition for that; Friendfeed is not even part of the same ball game. Friendfeed is an aggregator of content, not any kind of communications platform.

XMPP is the future of Twitter

SMS-based consumption is the gigantic market of potential consumers of Twitter. Add to that XMPP, aka Jabber, which is a well-defined standard for instant message passing, and you have a mature and powerful, standards-based way of producing content as well. This is what truly makes Twitter a platform, not just a website. Companies or organizations or services that want to push content via SMS no longer have to go through the gigantic mess of contractual and technical issues involved in negotiating with carriers (or even SMS aggregators like mBlox), because they can just layer on top of Twitter, and users can "follow serviceNameHere" via SMS without ever needing to know what Twitter is or how it works.

Push content via SMS is enormously valuable. Real-time information is like that. And Twitter is a disruptively easy and cheap way of doing it, a classic case of a disruptive technology: so cheap and easy it doesn't matter that it basically sucks right now, it's just barely good enough, and it will get better over time and overtake all other solutions.

Caveats et al

But wait, some will immediately cry: SMS only accounts for 5% of Twitter posts! SMS is irrelevant! But this misses the point: content production is only a fraction of total activity. People will post from desktop clients because keyboards are often quicker and easier, but they are reading posts on their phone. And the vast majority of users of any social application are lurkers who post nothing but listen plenty. The posting statistics conceal the real pattern of Twitter usage.

Others will point out that Twitter is mainly Jabber, and "all" you have to do is layer Jabber on top of an SMS gateway. Firstly, I can say from hard experience working at Boltblue that even if you're using an SMS aggregator service, managing an SMS gateway is an extremely difficult job, and the fact that Twitter has only 16 staff but manages to do this plus anything else is a source of constant amazement to me.

Finally, it also sort of amazes me that the superhumans who are managing to juggle an XMPP and an SMS gateway with anything approaching reliability are apparently finding it so difficult to keep a mere website running. Twitter's reliability is terrible, and I make no excuses for it. But they are sitting on a gigantic goldmine, and they have been sitting on it for over a year now without anybody introducing anything that even attempts to compete with their two core features. I refuse to believe it's because nobody has thought it worth trying, so it must be that they've managed to do something really difficult, and astonishingly well.

This is Twitter's game, and it's not even theirs to lose yet. So far they the only game in town.

I recently finished reading A Brief History of the Caribbean, apparently one of the definitive works on general Caribbean history (I seem to recall it being a history textbook when I was at school, after I had stopped taking history).

The thing about reading a history of the place where you live is that you discover you don't know the place nearly as well as you thought you did. All sorts of things that you take for granted because you grew up with them actually have strange and convoluted back-stories. Even more interestingly, I discovered that the sketchy history of the region that I had been taught in high school in Trinidad was a sanitized, almost bowdlerized version that exaggerated the role that Trinidad played and downplayed the less savoury aspects of our recent past.

The first genocide: the Amerindians

Even my sanitized high-school history was pretty clear about one point: when Columbus discovered the islands, they were inhabited by natives, and within a very short time they were all dead, of European diseases against which they had no defences. Tragic, obviously, but nobody could have forseen that, right? And there were only a small number of amerindians around to start with. A footnote in history before the real history gets started.

The reality is much worse. There were possibly as many as six million Amerindians living across the Caribbean at the time Europeans became widely aware of the islands*. Within 150 years the vast majority of these were dead, and one of the two amerindian cultures present at the time, the Arawaks, had been completely exterminated. Genocide is the only word for it, and the figure of six million may remind you of another, better-remembered genocide.

And this was no accident of history. The Europeans who arrived on the islands immediately enslaved the indians, without reservation or nobler motive. They interrupted their culture and lifestyle, moving them away from the coasts, denying them fish that were a vital part of their diet, adding malnutrition to the epidemic of European diseases like smallpox and measles that killed indians of every age by their thousands. Attempts at rebellion were cruelly supressed. The whole story is just unbelievably callous.

The second genocide: the Africans

Everyone knows that slavery was horrible, and that a lot of slaves died on the journey across the Atlantic -- something like 20% on every trip initially, although this decreased as sanitation and nutrition improved. But what I hadn't heard was that these deaths were only the tip of the iceberg. Unknown numbers of slaves died on the overland journey to the slaving ports in Africa, and a shocking 1 in 3 slaves died within 2 years of their arrival on the islands -- and all new slaves were young people.

Again, this was only partially out of cruelty -- though there was plenty of that -- and partly out of ignorance. Slaves routinely died of malnutrition as meat was scarce and they were fed only grain. They also died of many of the same diseases such as smallpox that had killed the Amerindians. But the horrifying death rate was uniquely Caribbean. The slaves of North America reproduced naturally, giving birth faster than they died: by 1825, there were 2 million North American slaves even though only 375,000 has been brought from Africa. In the Caribbean, by the same year, nearly 4 million slaves had been brought over, but there were only 2 million left.

Jan Rogozinski, the author of this history, estimates that to bring over the 4m slaves that were in the Caribbean by 1870, 8 million more had died. This is an unbelievably large number of people and I can't believe it's new to me.

Ongoing suicide: the Europeans

On top of the horrors they inflicted first upon the Amerindians and then upon the Africans, the Europeans who settled the islands were also dying in huge numbers. The most severe form of malaria, brought over from Africa with the slaves themselves, killed something like 75% of European adults encountering it for the first time. Yellow fever was similarly deadly, killing 50-75% of the people infected. In Europeans, who had little or no natural immunity to these things, the death rates were insane.

This was particularly obvious in invading soldiers, as they were large groups of non-immune individuals arriving at the same time. To take an utterly typical example: in 1655 the French landed 1500 soldiers on St. Lucia; a few months later, only 89 of them were still alive. And despite repeating this pattern for literally hundreds of years, the Europeans were strangely unable to learn their lesson: in a 4-year occupation of Santo Domingo starting in 1793, Britain lost more than 12,000 of the 20,000 soldiers it sent to disease alone. From 1817 to 1836, Jamaica lost 12% of its white troops every year.

A wealth of surprises

These were only the largest and most surprising of the many things about my own region's history that I didn't know. For instance, with reference to Trinidad in particular, it was a total backwater for literally hundreds of years -- ships didn't visit for 15 and 20 years in a row! -- and there were less than a hundred households on the whole island until well after 1700.

The other fact that was a surprise to me about Trinidad was his description of Eric Williams, Trinidad's first prime minister and widely admired within Trinidad, and especially his description of Trinidad's economy under Williams:

By the early 1980s, the government employed two-thirds of all workers, and it had more control over the economy than in any other Caribbean country except Cuba. ... Trinidad had taken socialism much further than the Manley government in Jamaica[.]

To hear my own country described as the second-most socialist nation in the Caribbean after Cuba is, to put it mildly, surprising to me. I think most Trinidadians now regard themselves as enterprising and independent and fiercely capitalist. There were lots of other little interesting tidbits, and I heartily recommend reading the book (no, that's not an affiliate link).

* Without getting into the debate about whether Columbus "discovered" the islands or not -- he probably wasn't even the first European to make it to the new world. He was just the first one to come back and tell everybody about it.

** Although after flying through 400 years from 1492, it gets rather slow around the 50s and 60s, which I guess is when the author was a young man and closely following the politics.