Links ...

Check out Scholars Without Borders, "a bookstore for academic books from India as well as from different parts of the world" [Link via Rahul Basu]. These scholars have a blog too.

Clay Shirky on Gin, Television and Social Surplus. Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody ("a book about organizing without organizations").

Spencer Kelly: BBC exposes facebook flaw (and a text report: Identity 'at risk' on Facebook) [Link via Liz Losh].

On a related note, here's Google's advice on online security [Link via Chetan].

Here's Google co-founder Larry Page on some of the things he has been "working on" and "looking at":

You can be a bit of a detective and ask, What are the industries where things haven't changed much in 50 years? We've been looking a little at geothermal power. And you start thinking about it, and you say, Well, a couple of miles under this spot or almost any other place in the world, it's pretty darn hot. How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole? We've been drilling for a long time, mostly for oil - and oil's expensive. If you want to move heat around, you need bigger holes. The technology just hasn't been developed for extracting heat. I imagine there's pretty good odds that's possible.

Solar thermal's another area we've been working on; the numbers there are just astounding. In Southern California or Nevada, on a day with an average amount of sun, you can generate 800 megawatts on one square mile. And 800 megawatts is actually a lot. A nuclear plant is about 2,000 megawatts.

The amount of land that's required to power the entire U.S. with electricity is something like 100 miles by 100 miles. So you say, "What do I need to do to generate that power?" You could buy solar cells. The problem is, at today's solar prices you'd need trillions of dollars to generate all the electricity in the U.S. Then you say, "Well, how much do mirrors cost?" And it turns out you can buy pieces of glass and a mirror and you can cover those areas for not that much money. Somehow the world is not doing a good job of making this stuff available. As a society, on the larger questions we have, we're not making reasonable progress.

Finally, today's mystery link.