He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

At the time, Shin, who was born and raised in the camp, felt no pity for them. Total control meant the political prisoners were in until they died.

But recent genetic work at Fudan University in Shanghai tested the Y chromosomes of more than 12,000 men currently living in different parts of China and found that they all descended from the original African humans.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

As illustrated in this image from Racing the Beam, the electron gun's movement included three large spaces where it was not drawing on the screen: the vertical and horizontal "blanks" on the top and left, and the "overscan" on the bottom. These blind spots were crucial for Atari programmers, as these were the only times they could do anything that didn't involve drawing graphics on the screen, such as computing joystick inputs, player movements, scoring, etc.

If you've ever seen little black lines appear at the left edge of the screen while you're playing a VCS game, those are bits of the game's code where the program is taking too much time doing other calculations, and it can't draw on the screen, leaving it blank. The black bar on the left-hand side of the Pitfall! screen at top was Activision designers' solution — they cut out part of the gameplay field in exchange for more processing time.

As if all this weren't enough, the VCS could only display five interactive objects at any one time: two "player" sprites, two "missile" sprites, and one "ball." This was more than enough for replicating Pong and Tank, the popular arcade games of 1977. It was useless for anything even slightly more complicated, such as Space Invaders.

But while Washington has been preoccupied with stimulus and bailouts, another, equally important issue has received far less attention — and the resolution of it is far more uncertain. What will happen once the paddles have been applied and the economy’s heart starts beating again? How should the new American economy be remade? Above all, how fast will it grow?