Monday, May 12, 2008

5,000 may be dead in Chinese earthquake

Wow. As an aside, this BBC clip, below, talks about some town near Tibet that I've never heard of. It has a population of 10m. That's amazing. China's "other" towns, you know, the little ones we've never even heard of, are as large as our largest city. It reminds me of a story my old boss, Ted Stevens, used to tell (yeah, I worked for Stevens almost 20 years ago now, get over it). He tells how he had a meeting with the then-leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, and how Stevens asked what the population was of China. Deng said "around a billion, give or take 20%." Stevens replied, "Mr. Premiere, do you realize that your rounding error is the size of our entire population?" Deng replied, "yes, Senator, but do YOU?"

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