A documentary in which Bavarians build a ramp from which to launch a BMW to America.
There is even a blog to go along with it. The footage is so great, I almost wish it was real. Buuuttt, after some further digging, it appears that this is part of a BMW advertising campaign. To further support this theory, the ads on the official Oberpfaffelbachen site don't go anywhere.
Nevertheless, it's a good watch.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
homecoming
Most likely, I'm still coated in a thin layer of silica mud from the Blue Lagoon. At least, it was still billowing through my tights on the three legs of my 31 hour trip home via Keflavík - Paris - New York - San Francisco despite my attempt at a thorough shower before checking out of the spa.
After a month, I'd have thought I'd be ready to come home, but this trip felt different. I'm not sure what I'm coming home to.
I had about enough energy last night to set down my bags, collect my mail into a pile, and brush my teeth before collapsing into bed at what I thought was a reasonable 9:45pm, considering that my Keflavík - Paris red eye earned me a meager 3 hours sleep. I read through Paris - JFK and will admit to having plugged in the free headphones to watch 27 Dresses. Romantic comedies seem to be following me this trip. I do still sleep well on planes and managed to miss almost all of New York - San Francisco.
I woke up at about 3:45 this morning, but stayed in bed until a solid 6:30. Sorted through my first pile of mail to a podcast of short stories by Mavis Gallant (whose book I am now determined to track down), then started to unpack.
The sun, the heat and the quiet feel oddly foreign. I am wondering what my new life will be like.
After a month, I'd have thought I'd be ready to come home, but this trip felt different. I'm not sure what I'm coming home to.
I had about enough energy last night to set down my bags, collect my mail into a pile, and brush my teeth before collapsing into bed at what I thought was a reasonable 9:45pm, considering that my Keflavík - Paris red eye earned me a meager 3 hours sleep. I read through Paris - JFK and will admit to having plugged in the free headphones to watch 27 Dresses. Romantic comedies seem to be following me this trip. I do still sleep well on planes and managed to miss almost all of New York - San Francisco.
I woke up at about 3:45 this morning, but stayed in bed until a solid 6:30. Sorted through my first pile of mail to a podcast of short stories by Mavis Gallant (whose book I am now determined to track down), then started to unpack.
The sun, the heat and the quiet feel oddly foreign. I am wondering what my new life will be like.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Vallanes, Egilsstadir, Iceland
It´s been a while.
With a 32 kb dial up connection, and Icelandic keyboard, and a bon fire starting soon, I don´t think I could cover all of the goings on since my last post, so I´ll just say life is good.
Worked late today packing mushrooms we hunted in the bit of forest near the farm along the road out to the lake. Eymunder found a beer in the cooler and told the few of us who stayed after to help that we´d better do something about it, so we had a spot of beer as we cleaned and bagged the last of them. Mushroom hunting suits me, I think. It would seem to be a solitary sport in which you find yourself kneeling in small gullies lost in a forest rooting around through the grass looking for just the right shapes and colors. Plenty of time to think. Or, better, not think. Time to give the brain a rest, to enjoy the way you can see clear to the mountains on a sunny day like today. To enjoy that you never believed Iceland really got hot enough to walk about in a tank top and then there you were having your way with weeds and clipping kohlrabi before lunch in just that.
This farm is magical, by the way. You could tell even just getting in to Eymunder´s car the first day that this was going to be exactly right, just as the rest of Iceland has been. Dangling your feet off the northern most Icelandic island for and after lunch postcard writing session on Grimsey, having crossed officially into the Arctic Circle. Something to write home about, to be sure.
I feel like I´m actually here. Which isn´t a sensation I have often. Usually floating above myself or in a corner somewhere, but here I feel present, ready for a new start like many of us here.
Tomorrow is Sunday, our day off. Not sure yet what we´ll get up to. It could be anything from hitchhiking to town to catch the bus to Seyðisfjöður to hiking to a nearby waterfall to taking a walk out to the lake. Even taking a final few laps through the mud, past the barley fields and potatoes to the beets or up through the horse pasture, along the woods, and back to the Monster House sounds nice.
But now it´s time for a bon fire.
With a 32 kb dial up connection, and Icelandic keyboard, and a bon fire starting soon, I don´t think I could cover all of the goings on since my last post, so I´ll just say life is good.
Worked late today packing mushrooms we hunted in the bit of forest near the farm along the road out to the lake. Eymunder found a beer in the cooler and told the few of us who stayed after to help that we´d better do something about it, so we had a spot of beer as we cleaned and bagged the last of them. Mushroom hunting suits me, I think. It would seem to be a solitary sport in which you find yourself kneeling in small gullies lost in a forest rooting around through the grass looking for just the right shapes and colors. Plenty of time to think. Or, better, not think. Time to give the brain a rest, to enjoy the way you can see clear to the mountains on a sunny day like today. To enjoy that you never believed Iceland really got hot enough to walk about in a tank top and then there you were having your way with weeds and clipping kohlrabi before lunch in just that.
This farm is magical, by the way. You could tell even just getting in to Eymunder´s car the first day that this was going to be exactly right, just as the rest of Iceland has been. Dangling your feet off the northern most Icelandic island for and after lunch postcard writing session on Grimsey, having crossed officially into the Arctic Circle. Something to write home about, to be sure.
I feel like I´m actually here. Which isn´t a sensation I have often. Usually floating above myself or in a corner somewhere, but here I feel present, ready for a new start like many of us here.
Tomorrow is Sunday, our day off. Not sure yet what we´ll get up to. It could be anything from hitchhiking to town to catch the bus to Seyðisfjöður to hiking to a nearby waterfall to taking a walk out to the lake. Even taking a final few laps through the mud, past the barley fields and potatoes to the beets or up through the horse pasture, along the woods, and back to the Monster House sounds nice.
But now it´s time for a bon fire.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Lasts
Later today, I shall be denuded of my work-issue laptop, so this is to be the last blog post written on shuttle wireless.
I've been wandering around these past few weeks trying to absorb what I can of what the past three years have been. I do think I've learned a lot. More about Silicon Valley, technology and big business that I had ever intended to know, but a fair bit about me too. I've appreciated building reading or relaxing time into my morning. I think I'd like to keep that.
I see people, like my favorite shuttle drivers, and want to tell them this is it, good bye, but then I don't because I like the idea that the future in their heads still has me in it.
I am a little nervous knowing that the check I get today will be the last for a long time, but all in all, I feel good about things. This feels like the right time to go. My work here is done.
Alright, I'm off for my last breakfast, the transitioning of the last few things, my last lunch, my last goodbyes, my exit interview, and then The Future.
I've been wandering around these past few weeks trying to absorb what I can of what the past three years have been. I do think I've learned a lot. More about Silicon Valley, technology and big business that I had ever intended to know, but a fair bit about me too. I've appreciated building reading or relaxing time into my morning. I think I'd like to keep that.
I see people, like my favorite shuttle drivers, and want to tell them this is it, good bye, but then I don't because I like the idea that the future in their heads still has me in it.
I am a little nervous knowing that the check I get today will be the last for a long time, but all in all, I feel good about things. This feels like the right time to go. My work here is done.
Alright, I'm off for my last breakfast, the transitioning of the last few things, my last lunch, my last goodbyes, my exit interview, and then The Future.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Back to basics
Had a nice chat with a coworker over lunch today about cultural knowledge, and how with all this technology we can operate (and survive, for now) at a high level without knowing how things work.
Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.
I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.
That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:
1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.
2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.
In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.
My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.
Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.
I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.
That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:
1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.
2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.
In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.
My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.
Waxing economic
I was listening to Professor Robert Frank of the Johnson School at Cornell University talk about economics, the economy and what we can do about it the other day on the Commonwealth Club. He claims that in another 100 years, Charles Darwin will have replaced Adam Smith as the father of modern economics, the key difference between their philosophies being that Smith's theory assumes that individuals acting in their own best interest will result in everyone getting what's best, whereas Darwin's theory leaves more room for improvement.
He gave the example of elephant seals: as a male elephant seal, it behooves you to be as massive as possible so that you can fight your competitors for a harem and send your genes into the next generation, which over time results in enormous elephant seals. Male elephant seals today can weigh up to 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds! All in all, Frank says, elephant seals as a population would likely prefer to be a third that size. They could escape predators faster and wouldn't have to find as much to eat, but such is evolution.
And this is where Frank says we as humans can step outside this cycle. We don't have to be victims of a vicious cycle. We can change the rules. In considering the current economic crisis, he emphasized the Keynesian government spending, saying that now is not the time to balance the federal budget by cutting spending, imbalanced as it may be. Even without fully knowing the implications of that sort of policy, it's heartening to hear an economist recommend that the government put more people to work, and not just digging holes and filling them back up à la FDR, but getting some real work done, like hiring people to inspect all those bridges and dikes and then actually fixing them to help prevent disasters.
The idea that really intrigued me though - and I'm not one to be intrigued by economics in general - was called something like the graduated consumption tax. It goes something like this - rather than taxing you on your gross income, the government would tax you based on how much you spent in a given year, and tax rates themselves could be (on the surface at least) much higher. For example, Frank proposed 100% tax for upper spending brackets, which I suppose in the end may be similar to the current tax structure in terms of how much money we bring in, except that it would encourage saving, a good behavior. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for this kind of thinking. All in all, it sounds to me like a pretty neat idea.
Fortunately, someone in the audience asked the question I was thinking of, which was - do we really want everyone stuffing all their money into savings right now? Don't we need that economic stimulus? And his answer was that, yes, consumption tax wouldn't be a good idea right now, but it would be a good idea to put it on the table for later. If we said we'd be converting to a consumption tax structure in some number of years, people would be incentivized to spend now, which would give us that extra kick we need, and then spend more moderately in the future.
For example, say you're a millionaire and you're just itching to build an addition onto your mansion (so as not to be outdone by your neighbors) and you're aiming to spend $2M on your project. If you know a consumption tax is on the horizon, you have two options: build a $2M addition now, or build a $1M addition later and pay another $1M (assuming you're in the 100% tax bracket) in taxes. Having the consumption tax on the horizon encourages you to build now, and anyone looking to build later will be incentivized to scale back, which, if everything goes according to plan, will help address the tendency for excess.
Future moderate spending is ok, he says, because money stored in banks and mutual funds isn't actually tied up. It's moving around as capital on the market.
Then, as I'm finishing dinner, feeling optimistic, the World Affairs Council wraps up and BBC World News starts up, main story: California lawmakers finally balance budget by cutting spending on education and social services. Sigh.
He gave the example of elephant seals: as a male elephant seal, it behooves you to be as massive as possible so that you can fight your competitors for a harem and send your genes into the next generation, which over time results in enormous elephant seals. Male elephant seals today can weigh up to 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds! All in all, Frank says, elephant seals as a population would likely prefer to be a third that size. They could escape predators faster and wouldn't have to find as much to eat, but such is evolution.
And this is where Frank says we as humans can step outside this cycle. We don't have to be victims of a vicious cycle. We can change the rules. In considering the current economic crisis, he emphasized the Keynesian government spending, saying that now is not the time to balance the federal budget by cutting spending, imbalanced as it may be. Even without fully knowing the implications of that sort of policy, it's heartening to hear an economist recommend that the government put more people to work, and not just digging holes and filling them back up à la FDR, but getting some real work done, like hiring people to inspect all those bridges and dikes and then actually fixing them to help prevent disasters.
The idea that really intrigued me though - and I'm not one to be intrigued by economics in general - was called something like the graduated consumption tax. It goes something like this - rather than taxing you on your gross income, the government would tax you based on how much you spent in a given year, and tax rates themselves could be (on the surface at least) much higher. For example, Frank proposed 100% tax for upper spending brackets, which I suppose in the end may be similar to the current tax structure in terms of how much money we bring in, except that it would encourage saving, a good behavior. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for this kind of thinking. All in all, it sounds to me like a pretty neat idea.
Fortunately, someone in the audience asked the question I was thinking of, which was - do we really want everyone stuffing all their money into savings right now? Don't we need that economic stimulus? And his answer was that, yes, consumption tax wouldn't be a good idea right now, but it would be a good idea to put it on the table for later. If we said we'd be converting to a consumption tax structure in some number of years, people would be incentivized to spend now, which would give us that extra kick we need, and then spend more moderately in the future.
For example, say you're a millionaire and you're just itching to build an addition onto your mansion (so as not to be outdone by your neighbors) and you're aiming to spend $2M on your project. If you know a consumption tax is on the horizon, you have two options: build a $2M addition now, or build a $1M addition later and pay another $1M (assuming you're in the 100% tax bracket) in taxes. Having the consumption tax on the horizon encourages you to build now, and anyone looking to build later will be incentivized to scale back, which, if everything goes according to plan, will help address the tendency for excess.
Future moderate spending is ok, he says, because money stored in banks and mutual funds isn't actually tied up. It's moving around as capital on the market.
Then, as I'm finishing dinner, feeling optimistic, the World Affairs Council wraps up and BBC World News starts up, main story: California lawmakers finally balance budget by cutting spending on education and social services. Sigh.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Down to the wire
Alright, today is the big day! Today has thus far included a spot of John time, a chocolatine, some strawberries and cherries, so I'm off to a good start and feeling jolly.
Then, a bit of chat with the manager later this afternoon. After all this time, I can't believe it's Today. Wish me luck!
Then, a bit of chat with the manager later this afternoon. After all this time, I can't believe it's Today. Wish me luck!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Ask and thou shalt receive
I, right at this moment, am on the verge of eating my second macaron of the day. A vanilla macaron, mind you, as opposed to a coconut macaroon. Someone in the pastry department of a nearby cafe made them, perhaps in celebration of Bastille Day, which is today. I am taking it as a sign, a good omen of what is to come.
And speaking of omens, I am all of a sudden having a hankering for another go at Ciana's tarot cards. I am Pretty Sure I would not get the soul sucker card this time. I hope to prove me right.
Ces macarons sont incroyable, by the way. Just incredible. You definitely want one.
And speaking of omens, I am all of a sudden having a hankering for another go at Ciana's tarot cards. I am Pretty Sure I would not get the soul sucker card this time. I hope to prove me right.
Ces macarons sont incroyable, by the way. Just incredible. You definitely want one.
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