Category: interesting

office space has been shrinking for individual workers. Regardless of overall office size, the amount carved out for you and your colleagues is getting smaller. In 1987, the average executive office was 291 square feet. As of last year it was down to 241 square feet. A “senior professional” is now given an average of 98 square feet to work with, and those poor call centre workers only warrant 50 square feet, according to the International Facility Management Association.

The IFMA said the shrinking trend has slowed a bit, but as of 2006 over half of workers (59 percent) spent their days in a cubicle. Only 7 percent of folks work in open areas with no partitions.

“There has been a strong overall trend to reduce square footage and most companies that had the opportunity, through drivers such as relocations or major reorganizations, have taken advantage of this,” said Melodee Wagen, president of Workspace Strategies Inc., when the data was released. “However, space reduction can only be taken to a certain point and have the individual workspace remain functional.”

Report: Tech’s Gender Gap Widened by Uninviting Workplace

In Technology

New research may shift the view of the gender gap in the tech workplace away from a lack of interest among females to the work environment itself, which women rated as unfavorable.

The opposite sex is much more interested in your face than your body.

The first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to attractiveness, by Marianne Peters from the University of Western Australia, shows that it’s not the body that attracts a mate.

For women rating men, attractiveness is 52 percent face rating, 24 percent for bodies.

When men rated women, attractiveness is 47 percent from her face, 32 percent by her body.

[short blurb at New Scientist]

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When asked what traits they look for in a mate, men and women agreed on the top nine traits. However, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher whereas women placed greater emphasis on honesty, kindness and dependability. [from a national BBC study of more than 450,000 people.]

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Women are better at remembering faces than men, probably because they’re more interested in social aspects of the world than men are. [link to blurb]

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Some women are wary of men who are both attractive and wealthy. A rich, good-looking man seeking a wife might do well to play down his wealth. [link to blurb]

One hundred women meet at a wine bar to recycle unused clothing.

Fun, adventurous, practical.

Offering to help organize events, the Swishing website says its purpose is to help “rustle clothes from friends”.

“The Art of Swishing involves getting your friends together to swap gorgeous clothes and party at the same time.” [story]

A Marine was deployed to Afghanistan.

In a letter from his girlfriend, she explained that she had slept with two guys, wanted to break up, and asked for pictures of herself to be returned.

The Marine asked his buddies for unwanted photos of women and mailed about 25 pictures of various women to his ex-girlfriend with the following note:

“I don’t remember which one you are.
Please remove your picture and send the rest back.”

The Z Backscatter Van is mobile X-ray.

BoingBoing caught the announcement of the Z Backscatter Van that can “slowly drive around and generate real-time x-ray images of cars, revealing weapons, explosives, drugs, and stowaways.”

Wow!

Judges and lawyers in this nation will be grappling with search rules for years and years.

American Science & Engineering asserts on their website that the vehicle reveals:

• Car and truck bombs
• Explosives, plastic weapons, and other organic threats
• Radioactive threats, including nuclear devices and dirty bombs
• Illegal drugs
• Stowaways, such as illegal immigrants and terrorists
• Trade fraud items, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other legal goods smuggled to evade duties

and adds that in ‘Stationary Scan Mode’, operators may elect to scan the occupants of the subject vehicle.

I wonder how surveillance, sovereignty and sensibility will shape our world.

The phrase “may elect to scan” will bother our legal framework for at least a generation.

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The Beatnik Robot Fights Back

There’s new hope to restrain the tyrant, the autocrat and the zealot.

What can minority radicals do if copies of subversive literature are returned to lists of contraband? Where is a hiding place for Mao’s little red book or a diary of vulgar terms or vault of patent drawings that may topple an industry?

There’s one possibly temporary but countervailing solution to the error of broad surveillance equipment.

The Beatnik Robot has been re-discovered. The device was developed by prescient beatniks of the 1960s. The robot “ferrets out the undesirables, including censors, book-burners….”

The LA Times has opened several photo archives [link] which included this anti-jingo, anti-supression robot.

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Wiretap the Internet Day

Today, Monday May 14, is the day that all US network operators are required by US law to install back-doors to make it easier for cops to snoop on their traffic. This has been the law for voice switches for over a decade, where it represents a potential holiday for dirty cops who don’t have warrants use these back-doors (and criminals and corporate espionageists who want to eavesdrop on sensitive calls). Now it’s part of our data infrastructure as well. Nice one, America.

“May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC’s expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.”

To restart the public’s investigation of the principles protecting free individuals and their social stature, island.org points out that “The Hippies Were Right All Along” published in San Francisco’s Chronicle.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness.

It was about how we are all in this together.

It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other.

In 1901, the Newark Daily Advocate published their ideas for 2001.

Now, candidly, wouldn’t you like to know what sayers will be saying, thinkers thinking, writers writing, doers doing and plotters plotting at the end of the next hundred years?

Will airships be provided for messenger boys?

Will lovely woman do the proposing?

Will woman bosses run politics as they now run the home?

From the 1928 Ogden Standard-Examiner:

The mechanical man, brazen-lunged creature of dreadful portent is among us! A few years from now you may rub elbows with him in the subway, turn out in the street to let him pass upon his ruthless way…

Paleo-Future posts visions of the future from the past, many from newspapers and magazines. It’s a fascinating look at our fascination with the future.

Pope Benedict XVI raged with equal fire against Marxism and capitalism, with a t authoritarians..

The IHT story continued:

“Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves,” he said. “And this ideological promise has proven false.”

Marxism, he said, left “a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction.” Capitalism, he said, has failed to bridge the “distance between rich and poor” and is “giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.”

He is not recommending a religious state:

“This political task is not the immediate competence of the church,” he said. “Respect for a healthy secularity — including the pluralism of political opinions — is essential to in the authentic Christian tradition.

“If the church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice.”

What I dislike about web heads and techies is the narrow focus. What I like about eco heads and greenies is the wide focus.

Emergic
Mobile Phones and Economic Growth
of how mobiles helped the Kerala fishermen increase incomes and pay for the mobiles:

Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes. [The Economist]

We are such slowness.

Before the Religious Age, there was the Tribal Age, and we await the Scientific Age.

In a Tribal Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is ancestors, and a person’s individual merit derives from his having “good” ancestors.

In a Religious Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is God’s will, and a person’s individual merit derives from his being approved by God.

In a Scientific Age culture, the moral authority of the laws will derive from the extent to which they improve overall welfare, and a person’s individual merit will derive from the extent to which he serves that end.

How Dangerous Religion Is explores the essence of religion and a warning about religion’s greatest danger: Since religion is faith in and loyalty to absolute power, it too easily claims to be absolutely without error.

But how dangerous is science?
1974 Noble Prize winner F. A. Hayek warned that our knowledge of the world is at best limited, incomplete, and uncertain.

“… a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain.

Analysizing Hayek, Philosophy.com points out “the fatal conceit” that is our “undue faith in the power of reason; that human knowledge is intensely personal and irretrievably distributed throughout the population.”

Remember warnings from Thomas Jefferson?
Where are his warnings that power and government can never know where the next idea or the next necessity will spring; that a light touch enables potency and vigor? Jefferson said no authority would have the wit to discover mankind’s pastoral future; that a free and unencumbered populace was the only assurance that we would find our path forward.

Raising brutish authority, religion’s intolerant belief, or the axim of premature science are the dangers most likely to suppress our agriculture of hope.

A greater respect for each other, cutting across rank and aggrandizement, is the charge of our Constitution.

When we argue for a separation of powers or for a humble distribution of rights, we are arguing for enabling our future.

Dirt is disappearing.

John Allemang reports [subscription] in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail:

“It’s a simple fact that we’re using up our finite supply of good soil faster than it can be made, and whatever our eyes choose to tell us, a crisis is looming.”

And then he says the loss is “…barely perceptible.”

The story swings on David R. Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [who] was quoted as saying,

“We only have a fixed amount of soil – and we’re digging it up.… We’re on track to lose most of our agricultural soils. And even if we solve the water crisis and the climate crisis, if we don’t conserve soil, then that will do us in.”

To help focus calm thinking, Canada’s alert Agnet looks into Montgomery’s new book, ‘Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations’ [review]:

“Montgomery takes pains to demonstrate the key role played by soil degradation in almost every civilization….

“Wrecking soil, he implies, is something humans do, given the opportunity, because we’re programmed to think of immediate issues such as personal survival rather than forgoing our inheritance to benefit the farmers of the future. And one reason we can do this with a clear conscience is our belief that soil is everywhere.”

There is a response to losing dirt that is not summarized in the weekend news.

Agnet points out that to reduce erosion, soil advocates try to persuade farmers to cut down or even cut out the tilling (plowing) of the loose, granular soil, maintain grassy ground cover, practise crop rotation, reduce chemical fertilizer and pesticide use while making better use of manure, introduce windbreaks and work the land along more natural contours.

Conservation tillage and no-till techniques were used on 33 per cent of Canadian farmland in 1991, and on 60 per cent by 2001. By 2004, conservation tillage was practiced on about 41 per cent of U.S. farmland and no-till methods were used on 23 per cent.

South America’s Franke Dijkstra has emerged as one of the most renowned experts in no-till farming.

“My average loss from rain in Brazil was 30 tons a hectare (about 13 tons an acre). I’ve even seen some instances where 300 or 400 tons go down the river with one rain.”

Within 10 years, planting no-till has retained soil and improved raised organic matter to as high as five percent. Yields have also improved dramatically.

Only 5 per cent of the world’s farmland is worked with no-till methods.

These are odd and challenging days as we struggle with global warming, depleted oceans, tainted water, over-population, contentious politics and war. Now where we walk must be included in fresh guidelines for sustainability. What happens to Earth’s earth may well shape the course of civilization.

Our communities and movements must feel and think and act in order to understand and change the world. We must respond with love and empathy to other’s feelings of despair. We must analyze the institutions of death and the path toward life. And we must act to make change happen.

http://www.religioussocialism.com/vision.html

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

the error of the militian is too few adjectives

one scruple equaled 20 grains, and three scruples made up a dram. And of course there were eight drams to an ounce.

wine and good whiskey teach adjectives in a manner

where politics extracts numerous definitions from fewer words and war conjures from fewest

did more than anyone to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and popular culture.

preacherly tone has emboldened all manner of scriptural bureaucrats and self-appointed faith leaders eager for a public voice

bowing to religious thinking and active support for the burgeoning of the faith industry in the political arena is having all kinds of negative consequences.

newfound confidence in religion as an alternative to politics has become de rigueur internationally

link

The causes of our unhappiness
or
How we learned to stop having fun

the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about 400 years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.

makes the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrangements, which is all to the good. But it can also transform the individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else.

The notion of a self hidden behind one’s appearance and portable from one situation to another is usually attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be

Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles.

But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, “the obverse” of the new sense of personal autonomy is “isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it”.

It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self.

Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression – suicide – and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person – potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change”, both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it.

an edited extract from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich,

a person’s desperation for love can be picked up by others in as little as four minutes, an effect that is off-putting to potential dates who want to be made to feel special.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/05/downside-of-having-too-much-love.html

dating is more than either triumph or intimacy.
It is a solitary and modern substitute for dancing in the streets

The United Kingdom is proposing to create their first Constitution.

The first laws to restrain power and increase the authority of a population were

Before the 17th Century, the term farmer was seldom used for anyone working the land.

ancestry.com shows the history and origin to be the name of a tax collector – the word ‘farm’ derived from a ‘firm’ tax collector:

“The term denoted in the first instance a tax farmer, one who undertook the collection of taxes, revenues, paying a fixed (Latin firmus) sum for the proceeds. Old French ferm(i)er (Late Latin firmarius)”

As if to help reveal the point, Wiki states that a farmer follows a “way of life that has been the dominant occupation of human beings since the dawn of civilization.” If this means the dominant had something to do with taxes, you can say that again.

In the 15th century, the fellows looking after the crops held an important position in the nobleman’s property and would be known as a ‘yeoman’ – to attend to various tasks of the sovereign. Wiki shows that yeoman is an ancient word with its roots, no pun intended, in ‘district’ or ‘country’, hence the term, ‘countryman’ or ‘man-of-the-district’.

During the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, the 1890 American Journal of Economics records the first ‘factory’ was built for what we now call a farmer. These factory farms recently harvested, no pun intended, over 75 percent of the cash from our nation’s agriculture. Today, four companies produce 81 percent of cows, 73 percent of sheep, 60 percent of pigs, and 50 percent of chickens.

Finally, there’s another interesting link to influence over money and power found in the more modern phrase ‘to buy the farm‘.

Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage and then buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, the pilot pays for the farm.

It’s clear that the ‘farmer’ has managed to remain especially well connected to government since they’ve been able to convince even the recently deceased to buy their property. It’s clear that what we now call a farmer has been next to the money for a very long time. And next to power.

And today’s ‘farmer’ is moving closer to money and power. They’re growing, no pun intended, toward the lucrative and powerful energy business where they will supply not only our food, but fuel for our electricity, our heat and our transportation as well.

History shows us that the ‘farmer’ has been very shrewd. It’s important for us to recognize how close they’ve been to the money all along. We need to pay attention before we find ourselves crippled under a Corn Cartel.

Ninety percent of the people in Britain believe United States is “dominated by big business.”

Two-thirds said their overall opinion of the United States had worsened in recent years.

Nearly 75% said American society is class divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens anything approaching equality of opportunity.

The poll indicates that “there has probably never been a time when America was held in such low esteem…” July, 2006 at the IHT

Dalton Roberts writes of his mother.

One of the best gifts my mother ever gave me was silence at a time I fully expected a severe lecture. In recent years I think I have gained a little insight into why she held her peace.

From age 14 through 17 I was a terror. I managed to get permanently expelled from school and started sneaking around and drinking. It is hard enough for me to admit these sins of my youth so don’t expect me to tell the whole story of my wild and crazy days.

My first little puppy love was a rough one. I think puppy loves may hurt more than the adult ones because we are at an age of great trust and trying out new realities. We have not learned how to deal with severe emotional pain.

The object of my puppy love had a father who was extremely abusive and no boy was allowed to walk her home from school. I would walk her to a little patch of woods behind her house and steal a good kiss. One Friday she told me she loved me. I walked on air all the way home but my elation ended Monday when her girlfriend told me she had gotten married to a boy home on leave from the service. I guess the poor girl would have done almost anything to get away from that sadistic father.

For days it festered inside me and one night I went to a bootlegger’s shack and got a bottle of moonshine. It was probably made in an old car radiator. It made me so sick I wanted to die. I passed out walking up the sidewalk to our porch and must have been laid out there in the yard for an hour or two. Finally able to walk, I slipped inside quietly and went to bed in a tiny bedroom in the front of our house.

I got real nauseous and had to push out the screen in the window. The cool night air gave me some merciful relief and just as I was settling down to try to sleep, mother eased into the room. The conversation went something like this:

“My boy is drunk, aren’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’re real sick, too, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She went to the bathroom and brought a wet rag and towel, putting the rag on my throat and the towel around my head. Nothing in my entire life has felt better than that wet towel and washrag.

Satisfied I would survive, she kissed me on the forehead and went to bed without another word. The last thought I had before passing out again was, “Boy, I will get both barrels in the morning.”

When I made it to the breakfast table the next morning, no one was in the house but mother and me. She cooked me some toast and scrambled eggs and talked nonchalantly about the weather and birds while I waited for the hammer to come down.

Mother never mentioned the events of that night the rest of her life. It remains in my memory as one of the sweetest gifts she ever gave me. She probably thought I had suffered enough and she was definitely right about that.

I think she knew something had hurt me deeply for me to punish myself so severely. I didn’t unload the contents of my heart on her so she knew it was deeply personal. She could see I was unable to talk about it.

Recently someone sent me an email that said, “Best friends may tell you what to do because that’s what best friends do. Wise friends, however, wouldn’t dream of it. They understand that they will never know the secrets that stir in our hearts and the depth of pain we may be feeling.”

I am so grateful my mother was a wise friend.

Dalton Roberts, the downhome philosopher from downtown Watering Trough, Tennessee, writing in the Chattanooga Free Press. Here’s the link.

Little did John Muir know that he and his little dog Stickeen would share one of his most memorable wilderness experiences.

They were faced with a dilemma.

They could either spend the night without shelter on the glacier and try to find a new route in the morning – or attempt to cross that crevice.

Muir decided to cross.

“Finally he ordered Stickeen to come to him. And for once the dog obeyed. Stickeen inched down the icy steps, barely lifting his feet. He crept across the sliver of ice, somehow holding himself steady in the gusting wind.

“Muir reached down for the dog when Stickeen was just below him, but the dog didn’t wait for a lift. He eyed the notches cut in the wall and came up them in a rush. Stickeen flew past Muir and obviously forgot how tired and hungry he was.

For the next few minutes he could not be stopped as he leapt, ran, rolled, and somersaulted in joy.

Read “John Muir and his dog on an Alaskan adventure”

Humans and dogs may be together because they are the animals of endurance.

When I was young and living near the Cree, a native friend told me a story to define the relationship of humans and the dog.

A man can do many things for a very long time. A cat can run faster, but only for a short time. A buffalo is more fierce but only for a short time. A deer can leap higher but only for a short time. A dog is the only animal that will be with a man at the end of the trail.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature,
they find it attached to the rest of the world. – John Muir

The human body benefits from gratitude and generosity.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070503.wlkarma03/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. – Anna Sewell, author of the classic novel, Black Beauty (1877)

Up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced.

Spiegel Online reveals some of the intelligence money outside of government.

Contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence.

Former CIA chief George Tenet carried on a “deep involvement in the privatization of US intelligence.”

Among several firms, Tenet is now assisting L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation’s biggest player in biometric identification. L-1’s software can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers’ licenses and transportation worker ID cards.

The National Counterterrorism Center is staffed primarily by contractors.

Update:
Frontline at PBS examines how the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program works and the clashing viewpoints on whether the president has violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and infringed on constitutional protections.

Probing such projects as Total Information Awareness, and its little known successors, Smith discloses that even former government intelligence officials now worry that the combination of new security threats, advances in communications technologies, and radical interpretations of presidential authority may be threatening the privacy of Americans.

War is an inside thing “…as government and industry work together to fight terrorism”. We may find that any future peace will reveal that we live in a very different world.

Dr. Phil.
Once “a panacea to a troubled nation too disabused of religion to turn to the gods, yet searching enough to need a sermon on the Mount.”

Dr. Phil.
Once “the afternoon appointment with voyeurism you could feel good about.”

Dr. Phil.
Now “racists and counter-racists, fatists and fatties, homophobes and angry lesbians — up together in a temple of confrontational mental health.”

“And it’s not just the guests that have changed.

“It’s not that these people don’t require help, but the program seems much less about help and more about punishment.

“When did Phil earn the purchase on parading the wicked?

“He is supposedly the voice of middle class whiteys with a faith in science. But though I still fit that demographic, I no longer feel like he speaks for me. And it’s not me who’s changed.” [more]

Kentucky Fried Chicken threatened a lawsuit for trademark infringement against a traditional pub in England, and ordered landlady Tracy Daly to remove the ‘Family Feast’ slogan from her Christmas Day menu at the Tan Hill Inn, saying it infringed the company’s rights.

[story at the Metro.co.uk]

The pub has advertised its “Christmas Day Family Feast“.

The hearty meal starts with soup or Guinness and Stilton pate, followed by roast turkey with Yorkshire puddings, cranberry sauce and vegetables. Punters can choose between Christmas pudding and Strawberry Gateaux for dessert, with coffee or cheese and biscuits to finish.

“They are a multi-million-pound international organisation and I am just a little lady up a mountain.”

The Colonel seems to be bonkers!

The global news source The Telegraph has since reported:
“A spokesperson for KFC GB Ltd said this afternoon: “KFC has to protect its trademarks against those who seek to trade off its brand. KFC has spoken to Mrs. Daly at the Tan Hill Inn and confirmed that it will not take this case any further.

“This means that Mrs Daly can continue to use the phrase “family feast” on the pub’s Christmas menu. It’s an unusual situation that has been blown out of all proportion.”

Trade off its brand?

Why not trademark the term ‘Christmas Day’?

We grant greed too much.

Cold War files on East Germany spying on West Germany ended up in the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany has made strides in having them returned – some 16,250 sacks containing the shredded pieces of 45 million documents that were found and confiscated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989.

Communist East Germany’s international espionage network, the State Security Service known as Stasi, tendered spies that penetrated important positions around the world. Many believe that “The Stasi issue cannot simply be brushed aside as an East German problem, as people in the West tend to do.”

Attempting to blow the cover of former agents, informers and victims, work began on the paper fragments 12 years ago. In that time 24 people have only been able to reassemble the contents of 323 sacks. A narrative time frame can be found here.

After laborious reconstruction of the sacks of shreds using fingers and tape, it was discovered that Stasi agents were sitting “right up front” at the Olympics massacre in Munich in 1972 and had taken “needle-sharp photographs at close range” of the attack on Israel’s Olympic team.

The BBC’s Steve Rosenburg in Berlin has said it has been a desperately slow process which, according to some estimates, could take 600 years to complete.

The BBC report reveals that new computer software is being employed by Berlin’s Frauenhofer Institute to speed up the process.

German scientists now believe they can complete the puzzle in the space of a few years.