Cyrus Farivar

The New York Times Magazine: [Jan] Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly…

The Baltic Times: TALLINN – Islam is taking off in Estonia. The Koran, the holy book which was recently published for the first time in Estonian, has been on the best sellers list for months. The liberalization of immigration policy, meanwhile, is likely to lead to an increase in the number Muslims settling in the country. Three thousand copies of the Koran have been sold since it was first published in December 2007. To put this in the context of…

Here’s my first batch. I’ve got nearly 1,000 in all. Here’s a few of my favs from the first round:

We had a six-hour flight from Tehran, braved Paris rush-hour traffic and made it to my aunt Firouzeh’s house in Issy-Les-Moulineaux. I’ll be spending two nights here (my parents four) before heading home to California for one night before I mosey on over to Austin for a week for the Science Literacy Project conference. So all of you who’ve been asking me when I’ll be back in Oakland, I wouldn’t count on seeing me until April 13.

They have free WiFi, and serve “Caffè Americano” at Tehran airport. No joke. More on the flip side.

I will be traveling abroad starting tomorrow and will not be blogging until early April. However, feel free to email me if need be. Thanks.

Obama: But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means…

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on mobile text message spam will air on Morning Edition today (March 17)! It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams). New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3…

I have a bunch of postcards of San Francisco that I bought for cheap from Cody’s moving sale yesterday. Want me to send you one? Email me your mailing address.

Agence France Presse: TALLINN (AFP) — Education authorities in Estonia Thursday warned that the hands-down dominance of English in its schools is depriving the Baltic state of the language specialists it will need in the future. A hefty 84 percent of pupils in this country of 1.3 million people opt to study English, according to official statistics. Some 41 percent take Russian as a foreign language. Russian is also the native tongue of around a third of the population. German…