How close to the tracks can you set up a market?

ht: Blattman

IMF Victims

There are so many conspiracy theories floating around the web about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Of course, many many French people are calling his victim a 'honey trap'/CIA operative set out to bring him down.

If she were such a honey trap you'd expect her to be a blonde bombshell (like many of his other extramarital ladies). But, no, she is an immigrant from Ghana.

Anyone else see a microcosmic parallel with the IMF in general? Trying to rape Ghanaians?

Airline safety videos - Who the hell watches those anyway?

First, at Delta they got a sexy stewardess to add a little sizzle to their video. It became somewhat of a meme on the interblags: Smoking is not allowed!




Then New Zealand Air does this!

Breaking the mold alright!  You will probably pay attention now! At least until you're forced to watch it more than 3 times...

I say lets democratize it. Make an art out of it. Someone ought to create a competition on youtube for the best inflight video. They'd get so many good entires they could have a different one for each flight! So often the corporate world doesn't understand the incentives of the youtube generation. People just want recognition.

And down with the forced consumption of advertising! If I'm going to be forced to watch ads, you'd better pay me for it. Right now. In cash or booze kind.

New Look, dunes

I'm trying out a new look, what do you think?

The photo in the background is one I took on a trip into the Rub Al Khali, to a little oasis of date palms they call Liwa. If your screen is big enough, you can see me standing on the dune.

To the north of Liwa, the desert is somewhat uneventful. It is relatively flat, with sparse shrubs and no significant geographical features. To the south, the desert explodes into a million dunes, you can see what I mean in this picture.

It is as if you are looking out on the ocean. The dunes, sometimes reaching up to 200m high, go on forever. It first appears so empty.  But, if you look closer, all forms of life somehow survive in the empty quarters of the world.

The biggest dune in 'Liwa' is called the Tal moreb, a reported 120m giant with a 50 degree face. Perfect for dune boarding, bashing or moto. It is absolutely nuts.

This is very funny

A new field of work

The other day I got a chance to talk with an old aid worker, someone who saw the birth of this industry, if you will, and it was refreshing. He spoke of times, when he was an up and comer, when there was no field called 'Aid work', there wasn't even a future for people who were "against the system". He was probably at least 60, but was remerkably clear about the changes in the aid game that have taken place over the past 30 years. We have created not just a single profession but a plethora of jobs that are singilarily focused on improving the structure and wellness of less developed counties and their systems, or at least purport to be.

Beyond aid work, there are thousands of occupations today, the very existence of which must have been impossible to predict 60 years ago.

What will the new fields of work be in the future?

Good and Proper

From George Orwell Novels.com: Mr. Orwell on what a cup ought to be.

A Nice Cup of Tea
Saturday Essay, Evening Standard, 12 January 1946

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilisation in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

Valentine's

Today, February the 14th, is a day many of us celebrate romantic love. Of course, we can go on about how greeting card companies are just making up holidays to justify their own existence (and make some money), but thankfully, it seems Valentine's day as a day of romance goes back a little further than Hallmark.

According to Jack Oruch of the University of Kansas, the association of romance with Valentine's Day began with Chaucer. In Parlement of Foules (1382) Chaucer wrote:

"For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make."

The trouble is... birds don't often mate in England in February, so people associate this reference to Valentine's day with the other, other Valentine (there were apparently four saints of the same name) who was remembered on the second of May.

Nudges and Fun

If you check my links over on the right --> you may notice a site called nudges.org. If you haven't checked it out already, it's a fantastic blog written by two prominent behaviouralist economist/authors by the names of Thaler and Sunstein. Their central concept is the nudge.

A perfect exemplification of the nudge is the urinal with a fake fly inked into the bowl.

Why add the fly, you may ask? Trademarking? Fun?

Studies have shown that, across different washrooms in different states, urinals with targets like the fly are less spilly... Guys want to hit they fly! These washrooms smell better, need less maintenance and are not as wet on the floor!

A little 'nudge' like this can cause drastic changes in peoples behaviour. There are tonnes more examples, and great discussion about behaviouralist economics at their blog.

Even better examples, and certainly more fun ones, come from the people at thefuntheory.com.

This one is my favourite:

Can you think of a lil' nudge to change people for the better?

ht: Marc Goss

Petra!

Sometime in the  6th century BC, the Nabeteans established Petra as their capital. 

It is a true wonder of the world:

It seems no work of Man's creative hand, by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned; But from the rock as if by magic grown, eternal, silent, beautiful, alone! Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine, where erst Athena held her rites divine; Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane, that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain; But rose-red as if the blush of dawn, that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn; The hues of youth upon a brow of woe, which Man deemed old two thousand years ago, match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time.

This one's for me mums

From Slate.com

   Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide--including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style--prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology--the manual typewriter--invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)

Lluís Domènech i Montaner

When I lived in Barcelona, (ahhh, the nostalgia) I lived just down a pedestrian street from the incredible Palau de La Musica. This moderniste marvel was constructed by a lesser sung hero of Catalan architecture (in the shadow of another Art Nouveau giant, Gaudi).

The Palau is so ornate it is almost blinding. These photos don't even do it justice.

He also designed and began to build the fanciful, fairy-tale Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona which has recently been redesignated, along with the Palau, as a UNESCO world heritage site. 

Lluís Domènech i Montaner is a true visionary.

What does one trillion dollars look like?

From http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html :


"All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"...

A billion dollars...

A hundred billion dollars...

Eight hundred billion dollars...

One TRILLION dollars...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.


We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

And $1 BILLION dollars... now we're really getting somewhere...

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising...

Go ahead...

Scroll down.
















Ladies and gentlemen... I give you $1 trillion dollars...











Notice those pallets are double stacked.


...and remember those are $100 bills .
So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"... that's what they're talking about."


From http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Beauty Implies Life?: Experience in the World's more gorgeous cities

Over the holiday I was fortunate enough to travel to two of the top five "World's most livable cities", according to the Economist and Mercer rankings.

What, you might ask, is so livable about these two cities? Well, I'm going to let you find that out by clicking on those two links above, and only say that they are both absolutely gorgeous cities. I know, I know, beautiful shmeautiful, but check these out (and these are just snaps I took leisurely walking around, with no intention of finding beautiful scenes):

If you haven't been as fortunate and have never visited either city, you might be convinced simply by these two pictures that they must, indeed, live up to their rankings. If that is the case then you would be mistaken. I think, despite the complex and vast calculations the two publications have done to tally every aspect of liveability, both have been hoodwinked by beauty. 

Of course, what should constitute 'livability' is invariably a subjective proposition and fans of these two beauts would argue for their rank to the death. For me, a city needs to have something going on. Here, I can use many other buzz words, how about pulse, vibe, heartbeat, or life. While these two certainly have their own tenor, their own character or atmosphere, it certainly is not very lively in either case. 

Perhaps I'm being to hard on city number two (as denoted by picture placement). It's core does have some activity, but it surely cannot rival any European capital.

For me to live in a city, and truly be comfortable, there needs to be something to discover all the time. There needs to be connectivity, energy and diversity. These, to me, are the inner attributes of a liveable city.  Beauty, as they say, is only skin deep; and for these two lookers, the beauty is only in the skin.

Oh, and can you guess which are the two cities?

From Mercer:

From The Economist:

Hapee New Year!

To bring in the new year I found a funny graph on the number one Canadian news story of the year: The Canadian Men's Hockey gold at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

According to this graph, courtesy of EPCOR, Canadians pee between periods:

...not that this is surprising or enlightening really, but I always enjoy it when a set of statistics can reflect such truth in our lives.

Some 80% of Canadians in Canada were watching the Gold medal game!

HT: Chris Blattman

Fantastic Mr. Kim

Looking at things:

from the hilarious http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

Phil-o-sophy (Love-o'-wisdom)

The topic of Philosophy popped in to a discussion I had with a devout Muslim work mate of mine today:

"Darwin, Freud and Marx represent the triangle of destruction," he said sternly and solemnly.

"Destruction!?" I said, slightly shocked, "With Nietzsche I think you have a fourth."

"Nietzsche?"

"Yeah, you know, God is dead? He is one of my favourites." I recapitulated facetiously.

"Ohh, Neitzsche. Yeah, he was lucky I was not alive, I would have hung him." He pronounced.

 I laughed,"Yep, I think we've completed your square."

Got front page google for 'superbear'!

Search 'superbear' in google and I'm in 8th place!

A huge jump from last week... I was on the third page.



If only the person who is hoarding the superbear.blogspot.com domain would give it up!

While we're on strips:

http://vladimirputinactioncomics.com/

Stats Class

xkcd.com