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

News from NASA

OK, this is good stuff. First and very timely - there will be a solar eclipse tomorrow morning. It will appear full only in very northern places, like Greenland. It's not clear to me if it will be visible as a partial as far south as Chicago or not. Here's the site. (Admittedly, I found this out from my friend's blog - thanks, P.)

Secondly, water has been discovered and tested by the Phoenix rover on Mars.

While we're on the subject of NASA, here's one of my all time favorite pictures: Earth at Night.

Brazil: Country of Tomorrow

There's a bit of dark humor in Brazil that it is always the country of tomorrow, with the implication that tomorrow never seems to come. Here's an article in the NY Times saying that Brazil is experiencing an economic boom. Let's hope it's true at long last.

Obama at U of C

Here's an interesting article in today's NY Times about Obama's time at the University of Chicago's law school. My understanding is that the law school is pretty far to the right, but that by and large they support and like him.

Another Einstein Quote

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

I'm working in an environment where people talk about programs and initiatives that are "metric-driven." I understand that it is useful to count things, but sometime it's just a bit much.

Semolina Cake

There was an article in a NY Times Magazine section about a month ago on semolina cakes that I'd left out for George to read. It had a Greek version and a French version. G's ideal version should have yogurt in it, so I've searched around and this one, with lemon from a blog called Cooking Adventures, sounds good to me.

I'll let you know how it is if we actually make it. I never bake, so odds are slim even though it sounds so tasty.

Einstein Quote

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

English summer pudding

A few days ago I bought both red and white currants at a farmer's market and I did what anyone would do - I started looking for recipes for English summer pudding. And I found one on an English food blog called Becks & Posh. It's very simple, cook a bunch of mixed berries for just a few minutes with a bit of sugar then put into a bowl you've lined with white bread. Refrigerate for a few hours while weighted. Good stuff, especially with cream drizzled over it.

Water Footprint

Have you thought about your water footprint? Global water demand will increase by 40% in the next 20 years. 1 in 5 people in the world do not have access to clean water, and municipal water prices are only increasing, 27% in the US over the past 5 years, 48% in Canada.

So, spend $2 and put an aerator in your faucet, put a brick in your toilet tank, plant indigenous plants in your garden, don't worry about your grass.

So much attention on Afghanistan

Is Afghanistan suddenly everywhere in the news after about 4 years out of the news because Obama thinks it's important?

I'm beginning to wonder about the herd mentality of news organizations - a few years ago, everyone had a cover about avian flu, because everyone else did. It was sensational.

Now, everyone has a cover, or at least an article, on Afghanistan. It's been there all along. Was no one paying attention?

A roadside restaurant anywhere in the world

On the coastal road on the west side of the Peloponnesus in Greece, we stopped for the night in an unpromising village 15 kilometers outside the big, ugly port town looking for a hotel. We found quite a nice, modern guest house just above the municipal beach, with a view of the Ionian Sea and olive trees.

For dinner, the proprietor suggested either of the two tavernas on the main road through the village just 2 blocks away. Both had tables in the open air facing the road with the kitchens at the back. The one we chose was lit by an abundance of florescent lights, making it a pool of white in the black night that was otherwise broken mostly by headlights. As we sat down and ordered a very simple, very Greek dinner of souvlaki in pita it occurred to me that I had eaten at this same place by the dusty side of the road in Panama and in Brazil. Each time I’ve wondered, why would anyone want to eat along the side of the road with exhaust fumes and grit? Why wasn’t the restaurant designed with the outdoor seating to the side, or to the back, protected from the road by the building?

Is it that outdoor seating at the back would isolate the patrons from the people passing by? Is this type of set-up more conducive to drop-ins and impromptu gatherings, thereby benefiting the proprietors? If you can see as you pass by that a group of your friends have gathered for a meal or a drink, you’re likely to join them. If on the other hand they are hidden in the back, you may not realize they are there and therefore will not become another paying customer. Perhaps this outweighs any disadvantage that the patrons might want to be secluded from the hustle-bustle and grit. Besides, if that were the case, they might have just stayed home.

So, does such a roadside restaurant only exist in small communities where one is more likely to pass by and recognize other patrons? Or does it exist on thoroughfares where the outdoor roadside presence is advertising, letting passers-by know that a restaurant exists?

I do know that the ones I’ve eaten at tend to have simple, good fare. Perhaps nothing to write home about, but nothing that’s made me ill either.

There is also a different sense of private space in restaurants in much of Europe and Latin America than in the US or Britain. In the US few restaurants would allow people to wander into the restaurant or even any outdoor seating selling flowers, serenades or sunglasses, but sitting for lunch on a Greek Island the passing hawkers approached the diners both inside and outside. Is the restaurant more of a communal space in Europe and Latin America than it is in the US? And by communal space, I mean that it is accessible to all parts of the community, not just the customers.