Brits behaving badly

The NY Times has a big article about the scourge of drunken Brits who descend on the Mediterranean, behave badly, get arrested or injured and basically make a nuisance of themselves.
I don't this comes as any surprise to anyone who's visited Britain or any place in southern Europe. It's become the standard stereotype of Brits.

The only up side is that by comparison, "ugly Americans" aren't so ugly any more.

Olympics - Where is India?

I was looking at this very nifty graphic on the NY Times site, which shows medal counts for all of the modern Olympic Games, and I thought to myself: Where's India??

It is so often compared to it's equally enormous neighbor to the north, China, which won 100 medals. I realized India was essentially missing, not just in this Olympics, but in past ones as well. India won 3 medals, half the number of Uzbekistan, and far, far fewer than Belarus, for example.

Why does India have so few? Tell me your thoughts, I'd love to hear.

Power can make you a jerk

This is a great article in Business Week talking about 1) how we start to behave like the people around us - so surround yourself with good and happy people, and 2) how power can make people into jerks. This sounds exactly like some people I work with. Hits the nail precisely on the head:

A growing body of research—notably by professors Dachner Keltner at University of California, Berkeley, Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford, and their students—documents that three things happen when people are put in positions of power:

1. They focus more on satisfying their own needs;

2. They focus less on the needs of their underlings;

3. They act like "the rules" others are expected to follow don't apply to them.

A particularly amusing study—undertaken by Keltner, Gruenfeld, and another colleague—shows that giving people just a little more power than their colleagues causes them to eat more cookies, chew with their mouths open, and leave more crumbs. Keltner also cites research showing that power leads people to process information in shallower ways and to make decisions that are less carefully reasoned.

Julia Child was a Spy

Check this out, Julia Child worked for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, during WWII.

Of course, Julia Child immediately brings to mind French cooking, but my favorite book by her and one of the only cookbooks I regularly refer to is The Way to Cook. It tells you how to poach and how to debone, as well as giving classic and delicious recipes.

Yucky Water as Art

There's an art exhibition in Belgium showing vials of vile stuff that passes for potable water in different parts of the world.

''There is growing concern about the scarcity of water, and the need to save it, but in many countries, it's still taken for granted as something that pours out of the tap,'' said Jane Withers, who co-curated the exhibition with Ilse Crawford. ''People think of water as a clear, neutral product that always looks the same. It doesn't, because it's a living thing, as the samples show. We hope that once people realize this, they'll consider using water more pleasurably as well as more thoughtfully.''

US taking over Georgian Ports!

Now that the cold war is over, are we going to enter a hot war with Russia over Georgia?  The verdict is out. Once we occupy Georgian ports, which is where Russia Black Sea fleet calls home, are the Russians going to try to take the ports back?

Speaking of Architecture

I've finally downloaded my pictures from my trip to Europe, and I was struck by the similarities between the "puzzle wall" at Delphi in Greece and the famous Incan wall in Cuzco.

This top one is from Delphi, which you would have guessed because of the column, I'm sure.

This second one, I found on the web. I'd like to go to Cuzco some day. I've been to Peru twice, but always for work and only to Lima, which is hardly a tourist highlight.

Olympic Architecture

I have to say I love the Olympics. For a wild and crazy Saturday night, we stayed in last night and ate dinner in front of the TV watching swimming and men's gymnastics.

I'm also loving the architecture. Of course, everyone's talking about how massive the investment was, but in some of these cases, the buildings are amazing. The Bird's Nest has become iconic, but I also love the Water Cube.

I know that usage for the facilities after the games has to be part of the plan and is taken into consideration when the city is chosen as host. It's not clear to me that it ever really works out very well. We'll have to wait and see.

So green

I was talking this morning over breakfast with George about EcoCities. There are a number of ambitious plans in the Gulf, as well as China and India, to build ground-up green cities. The solutions feel like overlaying smart technology onto traditional city layout, with public spaces and more room for walking than driving. So when I saw picture, which is the picture of the day from National Geograpic, of a clothesline, it made me think about how many things which in the 20th century we "improved" upon using machines and power, we are now going back to.

On a much less serious note...

In case you haven't seen the Paris Hilton response to McCain, it's great:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Western China

A few days ago, 16 police officers were killed in Kashgar, supposedly by a Uighur jihadist group. Here's a good article in the FT talking not only about the incident, but the situation in Xinjiang province overall.

I remember that after September 11th when Bush declared a "war on terror", the Chinese were the first to support it. I'm sure it's so they could legitimize any dissent in western China by the oppressed Uighurs, whose situation as been compared to the Tibetans except that they don't have a photogenic leader to take their cause to the world.

So, what do you think? True or False? One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Does it just depend on which side of the fence/ocean/ethnic divide you sit on?

A View of Oxford

Here's a cool picture from the BBC showing restoration work on the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford. This is the theater where the graduation ceremonies take place, entirely in Latin, which in my humble experience made it difficult to know when to walk.

Obama's Energy Plan

Hmmm, I liked Obama's refusal earlier in the summer to back the silliness of a summer gasoline tax holiday, but now I'm not sure I'm completely in line with his new thinking. I'm all for weaning ourselves off Venezuelan and Middle Eastern oil within a decade (though I can't imagine that will actually happen.) What I'm no so excited about is the interest in opening up more Alaskan wilderness to drilling for several reasons:

1. There are ample federal lands where oil companies already have concessions and are doing nothing with them
2. We only have so much wilderness - leave it alone!
3. We should be spending that money, yes THAT MUCH money, on conservation technologies and alternative energy technology

The earth is flat?

Here's an article from BBC saying there are people who really believe that the Earth is flat and that there's a vast conspiracy to say that the earth is round.

"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee.

Imagine!

George Quote

I've been quoting Einstein lately, and here's one from another genius near and dear to my heart.

"It's handy to have fingers." - G