The Swedish engineering consulting firm Sweco has determined that Santa Claus should begin his annual worldwide toy delivery in Kyrgyzstan—to be exact, at latitude (N) 40.40°, longitude (E) 74.24°—and continue his journey in a westwardly direction in order to maximize efficiency of distribution and avoid placing undue strain on his reindeer.

They would still have to fly at 6,000 km, or 3,700 miles, per second, though. But I suppose that the conventional limitations of physics aren't really an issue here.

In 2003, the U.S. Library of Congress paid $10 million for the first map in world history to use the name "America." The map goes on display in Washington this month, but researchers remain puzzled by its startling accuracy. Produced in 1507 by a German monk named Martin Waldseemüller, the map estimates South America reasonably well and even includes a large ocean to the west—years before the Pacific was discovered. Here, 500 years after its creation, is the famous Waldseemüller map:

U.S. Library of Congress

And here's what it looks like up close:

U.S. Library of Congress

Apparently, Australia boasts about 150 of what the folks down under like to call "Big Things." It all started back in 1964 with the "Big Banana":

Mark Kolbe/Getty Images News

Here's the "Big Oyster," which appears to be some sort of car dealership and actually looks more like a clam:

Mark Kolbe/Getty Images News

And here we have the "Big Macadamia Nut":

Ashlee Ralla/Getty Images News

And the "Big Gold Panner":

Cameron Spencer/Getty Images News

Here's the "Big Pineapple":

Cameron Spencer/Getty Images News

And my personal fave, the "Big Shrimp":

Ian Waldie/Getty Images News

iStockPhoto.com

My friend Beth stumbled across a Web site that ranks the readability of blogs. What level of education is required to understand your favorite blog? Type in the URL here, and voilà! It tells you the reading level. The site actually rates any Web site, not just blogs. So, dear readers of FP Passport, you will be glad to know that you are currently reading at high-school level. You are officially more edumacated than those who only look at the ForeignPolicy.com home page without delving into the blog. They read at a junior high-school level.

What about the readability level of some other popular Web sites out there? New York Times (junior high school), Washington Post (high school), Financial Times (genius), Economist (genius), Arms Control Wonk (college undergrad), Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (high school), Daniel Drezner's blog (high school), the State Department's Dipnote (high school), and the Huffington Post (junior high school). 

And the readability of the home pages of presidential candidates? Here are a few: Hillary Clinton (elementary school), Rudy Giuliani (genius), Barack Obama (genius), Mitt Romney (elementary school), John Edwards (genius! His blog, however, is at junior high-school level), John McCain (junior high school).

This silliness reminds of a Web site that was all the rage a few years ago: The Dialectizer. Type in a URL, and the site will translate it into your choice of dialects, including "redneck," "jive," and "cockney." The headine and intro for The List on FP's Web site this week, translated into Elmer Fudd-speak, reads: "De Wist: Five Weasons to Be Dankfuw Dis Danksgiving." Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

Hat tip: BKNY 2.0 (elementary school)

Just in time for Guinness World Records Day Thursday, a church steeple in Suurhusen, Germany, has been declared the most tilted tower in the world, toppling the record of the world-famous Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Guinness World Records found that the 13th-century church's 15th-century steeple tilts an astonishing 5.07 degrees, while Italy's circa-1372 defending champ in Pisa only tilts 3.97 degrees. Nevertheless, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is still taller. At 185 feet (56 meters) tall, it towers over the 84-foot (26-meter) German steeple, which rests on a wooden foundation and sodden soil. And with its ornate columns, arches, and cornices, Pisa's leaning tower is nicer to look at.

Check out the video here:

AFP/Getty Images

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono released his first music album today. According to Reuters, the CD features ballads and religious songs that the president wrote himself. The former general's talents were not unknown. During his election campaign in 2004, Yudhoyono would occasionally woo supporters with a few songs, and his crooning obviously didn't cost him the presidency.

Another Indonesian general, former Armed Forces Chief Wiranto, is widely expected to run for the presidency in 2009 and may seek to reclaim his title as Indonesia's top singing general. In 2000, Gen. Wiranto released his own CD of ballads that he sings himself. Wiranto indicated that profits from the CD sales would go to help Indonesian refugees from the war with East Timor.

And the list of world leaders known to belt out a few notes is not restricted to Indonesia:

• Passport blogged earlier this month about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's own "All Time Hits" CD
• Former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda released an album last year at the age of 82 intended to help raise money for victims of HIV/AIDS
• Chinese president-in-waiting Xi Jingping's wife is a well-known folk singer
• During a trip last year to Graceland, Junichiro Koizumi decided to sing a few lines of Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender" in front of reporters; the former Japanese PM even released his own "best of" album of Elvis selections in 2001
• In 1999, then-President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines released a ballad he sang accompanied by a 72-piece orchestra
• Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung used his vocal abilities in television ad spots designed to promote tourism in his country back in 1998

Let's just hope that Hillary Clinton doesn't get any ideas from all this singing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is known for bringing out in public his beloved dog Koni, a black Labrador retriever. In fact, he has even used his large dog to intimidate German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is reportedly scared of dogs due to a childhood biting incident.

Putin has also revealed a macho "my dog is bigger than yours" mentality in ridiculing U.S. President George W. Bush's Scottish terrier, Barney. When Bush once visited Putin's summer home, Koni came running out, and Putin said to Bush, "Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner—than Barney."

But Putin's little secret is that he has a special place in his heart for the most unmacho of dogs, his poodle Tosya. Putin has tried to keep his fondness for Tosya hidden, ever since news of the poodle made some Russian men perceive him as a wimp. (Today, Tosya is conveniently described as belonging to Putin's wife Lyudmila.) And the poodle is pampered. A 2005 interview with Tosya's hairdresser revealed that the poodle's fur is trimmed "in lion's style" once or twice a month for 150 euros ($213 at today's exchange rate) per trim.

Photos of Tosya have been extremely difficult to come by, but Scottish Terrier and Dog News, the authoritative source for news on Scotties and other canine-related matters, which has been following the story closely, recently announced that a photo has finally emerged. The photo, included here, shows Putin in the throes of affection with Tosya. So much for ridiculing Barney!

Earlier this week, Passport speculated as to why the mood of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il improved so dramatically from Tuesday to Wednesday during his summit with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. On Tuesday, Kim looked sullen and glum, but on Wednesday, he was all smiles, even asking Roh if he wanted to extend his stay for a few more days. Was Kim putting on a show for the international community? Was he happy about the agreement to end the decades-long Korean War, or relieved about the agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons?

None of the above. Knowing Kim is a film buff, Roh gave him a stack of DVDs of South Korean movies and television shows. One was "Jewel in the Palace," a television show about a cook for the Korean royal family back when the peninsula was unified. It stars Lee Yong-ae, rumored to be Kim's favorite actress. For a guy who loves movies so much that he once kidnapped a director and actress and forced them to fulfill his cinematic vision, it's a nice gift.

It's also ironic, considering Pyongyang prohibits DVDs from the South. Here's how the government enforces the ban, according to Reuters:

A routine tactic used by North Korean police is to cut the electricity to apartment blocks before a raid and then go to each home to check what is on video tapes or DVDs that have become stuck inside players.

The downside for Kim is that he's going to have to enjoy his DVDs on an old television. It was rumored in the South Korean press that Roh would present Kim with a flat screen TV. That idea was scrapped - the TV would have violated UN sanctions prohibiting luxury good exports to the North.

OFF/AFP/Getty Images

Russians must be feeling a tinge of nostalgia today, the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. But while the days of immense public curiosity and excitement for space exploration are about as over as the Soviet Union, the space race is still alive and kicking. In this week's list, FP takes a look at some of latest frontiers in space research and the unexpected cosmic challengers who are gearing up to take on American space dominance. From Mars to space weapon, the race is on.

But we left off a few out-of-this-world ideas that might just belong on the pages of a science fiction novel:

Going up? Forget loud, jarring rockets. Imagine taking a smooth ride up a 62,000-mile cable into space on a cosmic elevator. Although I couldn't explain the physics behind it for the life of me, scientists have been looking at possible plans for a space elevator constructed of carbon nanotubes. NASA and the Spaceward Foundation are holding a competition in Utah this month for the best design.

Greening outer-space Despite the rush to wean the world off dirty energy sources, space-based solar power is still waiting on the sidelines. The vision is quite simple: Platforms that capture sunlight are put in space and the resulting energy is then beamed down to Earth. Col. M.V. "Coyote" Smith, space-based solar panels' biggest fan, spearheaded a study (without any funding) for the National Security Space Office in an attempt to convince the Pentagon of the technology's feasibility. To add to the geek appeal, he then gave his presentation in Second Life.

Five-star accommodation $4 million for a three-night hotel stay? Only if it's in orbit. Xavier Claramunt plans to have Galactic Suite, the first space hotel, up and running by 2012. Of course, there is a lot of planning that goes into accommodating people in a zero-gravity atmosphere, like figuring out how guests can shower. Claramunt's solution: a spa room where bubbles of water will float around you.

Of course, we can debate whether spending millions of dollars and unquantifiable amounts of brain-power into these kinds of space endeavors is really the most prudent use of our resources. And for countries like China and India, there are countless terrestrial causes that could benefit from the investment otherwise going into establishing massive space programs. But if anyone is offering a free ride on a space elevator and a stay at the nearest galactic hotel, sign me up.

Johannes Simon/Getty Images

On the right: A young boy in a traditional Bavarian costume Oktober-rests in a cart during the Costume and Rifleman's Parade Sunday in Munich, Germany. The procession, which features oompah bands and people in Bavarian costumes, takes place annually on the first Sunday of Munich's Oktoberfest beer festival, which this year began on Saturday and lasts until Oct. 7.

Other highlights from the opening weekend include:

• 500,000 liters of beer gulped
• 11 oxen devoured
• 60 "beer corpses" (though a spokeswoman for the Munich police said the actual number of people who drank themselves unconscious was probably higher)
• An out-of-control American man who threw a carrot, injuring a Chilean woman near the eye
• An inebriated Swiss man who got scared by a mechanical ghost and attacked it.

Visions of the future generally reveal more about the time in which they are created than the time they are predicting. Take for example this film of rocket pioneer Werner von Braun describing humanity's space-bound future, made during the early days of the space race. Or this article from the rapidly industrializing America of 1900 predicting that all wild animals would be extinct by 2000 and that Nicaragua and Mexico would join the union after the completion of the Great Nicaragua Canal. (Both of these examples can be found on the fantastic Paleo-Future blog, which specializes in this sort of thing.)

It is with this history in mind that I approach the World Future Society's just released Forecasts for the Next 25 Years. The predictions are quite interesting, and about as plausible as the ones above probably seemed when they were made. Not surprisingly, wariness about the rise of China is prevalent. The WFS predicts that a water shortage in China will cause the price of commodities around the world to increase. They also believe that India's future development is more viable than China's because of its greater political transparency and democratic institutions. All this reflects traditional wisdom in political economy, but I'm not so sure. For the past few years, China has specialized in disproving the traditional wisdom. The WFS also reflects current fears about global warming in forecasting, "The costs of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year." As the Times pointed out this week, 20 years ago, the depletion of the ozone layer was leading scientists toward similarly gloomy predictions. Admittedly, global warming will be a much tougher problem to address, but the future may surprise us.

Here's the best prediction, though:

Forecast #4: We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030. In the next 25 years, we'll learn how to augment our 100 trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence and to each other. By the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.

As I sit here using this primitive input system to create this post, the thought of being able to use my vastly improved interneuronal connections to research foreign policy and find links for blog posts (I imagine it would look something like the above postcard from 1910) gives me a supremely nerdy glimmer of hope about an otherwise bleak-seeming future. And maybe that's what futurism is really about. 

Interested in a 180-year-old country with great beer, surrealist art, and female tennis players—and no functioning government? Boy, have we got a deal for you.

This week, a Belgian prankster put his country up on eBay, promising: "For Sale: Belgium, a Kingdom in three parts ... free premium: the king and his court (costs not included)."  The joke was a creative protest of the country's ongoing political crisis which Passport wrote about a few weeks ago.

Some readers thought our somewhat tongue-in-cheek post about the possibility of Flanders and Wallonia splitting was overblown, but Tuesday was Belgium's 100th day without a government and the crisis appears no closer to resolution. The leading Walloon newspaper, Le Soir, says the crisis can only end in "divorce or separate bedrooms" for Belgium's linguistic groups. The Economist has flat-out encouraged the country to call it quits. Even Belgium's would-be prime minister, Yves Leterme, claims there's nothing holding the country together but "the king, the football team, some beers."

Is it only a matter of time before the Belgian crisis has its own logo and theme music on CNN? While the situation certainly appears more serious, there stills seems to be a certain amount of schadenfreude driving the growing media coverage (including ours) of Belgium's possible breakup.

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers has had enough of plagues, famines, droughts, hurricanes, and genocides. Chambers considers these incidents to be terrorists acts. To stop them, he's suing the person responsible for them—God.

Chambers, who before becoming a state legislator was a barber, filed a lawsuit last Friday in Nebraska's Douglas County District Court, naming himself as the plaintiff and God as the defendant, a permanent injunction "ordering defendant to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats." Check out the suit here (pdf).

Some choice bits excerpted below:

God could not be reached for comment.

JENS SCHLUETER/AFP/Getty Images

While soon-to-be former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is struggling with his health following his resignation announcement, there are some people in Japan that have been injected with fresh lease on life: those in the manga industry.

Following the news of Abe's resignation Wednesday, shares in manga retailers jumped dramatically on speculation that Taro Aso, an avid manga fan, will soon replace Abe as Japan's PM. For instance, Broccoli, a retail chain selling games and comics, saw its share price leap 71 percent, and second-hand bookstore Mandarake closed 13 percent higher. Meanwhile, Japan's main share index fell half a percent.

But why has the manga market reacted so enthusiastically? Simply knowing that Abe's likely successor is a manga fan hardly explains the dramatic market movement.

Maybe investors sense that there may be more tangible benefits in the near future. While serving as Japan's foreign minster earlier this year, Aso was instrumental in creating the "Nobel prize" for foreign manga artists. He's keen on promoting manga overseas, arguing that the comics are a critical vehicle for enhancing Japanese diplomacy, with "warm feelings" for Japanese manga and anime translating into warm feelings for Japanese foreign policy, especially in the Asian region, where manga is already popular. Perhaps the investors responsible for the jump hope that Aso's manga diplomacy will prompt international markets to go crazy for the Japanese comics. Perhaps they even hope that Aso may provide more than just publicity. Whatever happens with the industry, one thing's for sure if Aso take the reins: Prince Pickles will be sticking around.