Greenland on Wednesday between noon and 2pm, David Cameron, and Zachtronics

(What I've been reading)

1. Tim Urban’s travel stories, on his old blog and the main one, will make you feel like 14 different emotions. The highlights are great and you should read these. And the 360p videos he uploaded in 2007 still load.

Cross-country USA road trip (I love this):

I made a lot of phone calls during this drive. It’s funny, cause when you’re the one on a long drive you’re like, “So, how about the Red Sox?! They’re looking good, huh? Let’s talk about potential playoff batting orders.” And the person you’re talking to is like, “Yeah, I’m gonna…I’m gonna go.” And then you’re like, “Let's play 20 Questions!” and they’re like, “Yeah, no…I’m gonna go back to what I was doing.”

And then sometimes there’s the really awkward situation when you’re the one on the long solo drive and you get sick of talking to the other person and you want to get off the phone. You can’t make an excuse—they know you don’t have anything you could possibly have to do. You’re just like, “Um, I’m gonna………….go.”

Greenland:

In one town I visited, every Wednesday between noon and 2pm, a cop drives around and shoots any loose dog he sees.

Uzbekistan:

I got on a bus headed for Tashkent, and noticed that it was mostly empty. Which was awesome. Until it drove ten minutes to a busy marketplace, where 68 people, with their turbans, and their chickens, and their music, got on until the bus was completely packed. Seeing this coming, I quickly looked at the driver, pointed at the seat next to me, and doubled my payment to him. He got it-- I was buying both seats, to maintain my space. 18 seconds after I paid him, a big man plopped down in my second seat. And of course, I had no way to explain the situation to him. I thought for a second, and then resigned, defeated, and squished over to my side.

Kashgar, China:

One day I sat and watched a locksmith guy for an hour while he sat Indian Style and hammered a piece of scrap metal into a key for a lock. It was cool-- I bought the lock from him, and after he finished, I took my camera out to take a picture of him. Another guy saw this and ran over and got in the picture. But I only wanted a picture of the locksmith, so I moved the camera over a bit and cropped the other guy out of the picture. Then the guy I cut out motioned that he wanted to see the picture. Awkward.

Boat trip through the Amazon:

When I need to know what kind of meat I'm about to eat, I invariably end up making animal sounds, an activity that leaves me with no option other than to loathe myself. The worst is that you can't even say "Moo" for a cow because that's kind of an English translation-- you have to actually moo. And buck, baa, oink, nay, and god knows what else. It sounds potentially fun-- it's not.

And:

2. Steve Hilton recently started a run for California Governor, and coincidentally he’s popping up in David Cameron’s autobiography and Sasha Swire’s diary about the Cameron years that I’m reading. Hilton came up with interesting ideas for Cameron and I wanted to see what’s in his books.

   1. *More Human*:

      1. “Evolutionary biology shows that in the course of human history we have become ever more empathetic.” From a brief search this does not seem proven. I can’t guess.

      2. “Sir John Cowperthwaite was the financial secretary of Hong Kong in the 1960s and the man widely credited with creating the conditions for its phenomenal economic success. When asked what advice he would give to a poor country trying to get richer, he said, ‘They should abolish the Office of National Statistics.’ Cowperthwaite believed that the collection of economic data simply encouraged governments and bureaucrats to needlessly and destructively interfere in the economy, so he refused.”

      3. Steve talks about the Family Independence Initiative in Oakland (now called UpTogether!), which invests in people in financial hardship:

         1. “Staff are explicitly forbidden to advise families or give them ideas. For ‘helpful’ people (as social workers tend to be), this is a very difficult—sometimes impossible—impulse to control. But stepping back is essential, as it creates a vacuum that families fill with their own ideas.”

         2. “Staff are allowed only to ask open-ended questions like: ‘What do you think should be done?’ and ‘Do you know of anyone who successfully did what you want to do? Can you ask them for help?’”

      4. “When we were accompanying the prime minister on a 2011 visit to Africa, Rohan and I asked to see one of James Tooley’s schools in one of the worst slums in Lagos, Nigeria. Whereas the UK-government-backed, state-run school was a disaster, the Tooley-backed for-profit school was a sensation: eager children in pristine uniforms learning literacy, math, science—with the help of a solar-powered computer. This is in the middle of a slum. Literally. To get there, Rohan and I had to pick our way through stinking, festering garbage, open sewers, ramshackle structures that could and would be washed away by the next rains.”

      5. “The executives of Snow Peak, a Japanese camping-gear company, thought they would create better products if they could observe their customers using them. So the company adapted the concept of a factory store: they created a “factory camping ground.” When they built their headquarters, they sacrificed large amounts of land around the building so customers could come and camp in view of the windows.”

         1. This was in Japan, and in the last few years they’ve built something similar in Washington state.

   2. *Positive Populism* is not as interesting, but this is good:

      1. “Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and leader of our coalition partner the Liberal Democrats, was formally responsible for overseeing the government’s social mobility strategy. One of his more modest, but absolutely correct, proposals was for the government itself to practice what it preached: he wanted to ban government ministers and civil servants from offering internships in an informal, closed manner—you know the kind of thing, where the positions are handed out to children of friends, godchildren and the like, so no one without the right connections gets a look-in. All of us in the policy staff thought this was a good, sensible, and fundamentally uncontroversial proposal. But then it reached the prime minister’s desk. David Cameron reacted with total fury and vowed to block it at any cost.”

3. Zach Barth’s *ZACH-LIKE* — a book chronicling his games and designs — is a great reminder that obsession is necessary for excellence. Zach is obsessed while being a very kind and conscientious person; he reminds me of Conan O’Brien.