What do diamonds, monkey chow, Microsoft, ants, and flaming socks have in common?

[avram]

I’ve got links about all of them in my Del.icio.us account:

• Stephen Kilnisan, jeweler and techie, is also the unofficial historian of New York’s diamond district, the stretch of 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues through which most of the diamonds sold in the US first pass:

  His eye is caught by two gentlemen huddled in conversation outside 11 W. 47th St. “You see that?” he says. “They’re making a deal.” He narrates the transaction as it unfolds. “One of them pulls out a pouch containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. They haggle for a while, then the handshake. Deals are still made on handshakes here.” In fact, according to the Diamond Dealers Club bylaws, “Any oral offer is binding among dealers, when agreement is expressed by the accepted words ‘Mazel and Broche’ [‘good luck and a blessing’] or any other words expressing the words of accord.” Even more remarkably, since the Talmud prohibits resolving conflicts in non-Jewish courts, disputes on 47th Street are not handled by civil courts but upstairs at the Diamond Dealers Club, where a board of arbiters presides over oral hearings (notes are never taken and the hearings are never recorded) and deliver judgments based on common sense, trade customs, and principles of Jewish law. For generations, this is how diamond dealers throughout the world have conducted business, and it continues to be the principal mode of operation on 47th Street.

• The Monkey Chow Diaries — can a human being subsist on nothing but monkey chow? Probably not.

• The Mini-Microsoft blog’s FAQ on Microsoft’s review, promotion, and job-change process.

• The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant — Walter Tschinkel of Florida State U’s Dep’t of Biological Science made casts of the structure of ant’s nests by pouring orthodontal plaster into them. He also tried using metals, thus learning on all our behalf the valuable lesson: “Pouring red-hot aluminum in the bottom of a 2-meter pit runs the risk of having ones socks catch on fire from the radiant heat.” There are photos! Of the ant’s nest models, not the burning socks.

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