OK, and now that I've seen Dell's actual question--it seems a lot more hostile and less helpful than I originally assumed.

The U.S. financial media certainly seems to be reporting this story in a limited way.

Er ... and, of course, when I say "Davos" (the name of a place in Switzerland) all through that last post, I mean to say "Dell" (the name of a CEO). Careless mistake.

The Davos-Putin exchange could be seen as an example of cross-cultural miscommunication. But it could be something more interesting.

Davos' offer of "help"--delivered no doubt with sparkling visions of new markets dancing before his eyes--was surely not intended as a patronizing, unfavorable assessment of Russia's technological prowess. It reads like standard, feelgood, let's-be-friends sales jargon, akin to "Now, what do I have to do to get you into this '92 Toyota Tercel today?"

People in the U.S. are accustomed to tuning out and toning down this kind of sales pitch, but Russia's nascent capitalistic culture seems much more direct, even brutal in certain respects. Putin probably doesn't have much of a frame of reference for all this Dale Carnegie happy crap.

So, while it's plausible that Putin simply took it the wrong way, who knows? He's no idiot--maybe he intentionally misinterpreted Davos as a signal that Russia intends to take advantage of the United States' weakened economic situation as an opportunity to change the rules of the game.

I'd always assumed that auto manufacturers knew this all along, and purposely designed their car models with "facial features" to appeal to different personality types.

Most likely, this study only confirms something that has been suspected for a long time.

Speaking subjectively, I know that the brain can easily find certain patterns in randomly arranged shapes. Look at a tiled floor or chain-link fence; you can pick out all kinds of Tetris patterns when you make up your mind to look for them.

However, the "facial feature" patterns are the ones that seem to have the greatest amount of expressiveness--that is, of all the shapes you can pick out from a random arrangement, it is an arrangement resembling two eyes and a mouth that seems automatically to elicit an emotional response, and minor differences in these arrangements--e.g., whether the "mouth" turns down, whether the "eyes" seem to gaze upward--can produce a wide variety of distinct emotional responses.

Since it's out of print, the most ethical thing is to support your economy by purchasing the used copy from a locally owned, independent bookstore. Only go to Amazon.com or some other national chain as a last resort.

After that, you're justified in downloading the electronic version--although, personally, I find hard copy much easier to read than e-text.