Results for “water” 831 found
Ranking of major tourist sites
Tyler’s ranking of major world heritage/tourist sites (could be buildings, national parks, etc.) in terms of which far exceed/underwhelm expectations derived from casual internet surfing.
This is off the top of my head and not pondered for very long, with eleven or more in the top ten:
1. Northern Arizona/southern Utah, various national parks, culminating in the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Yes, #1 in the whole world and overall I am not such a travel nationalist. So it must be really, really good.
2. Iguassu Falls.
I have seen only the Brazilian side, Argentina would make it better yet. Beware the coatimundis who like to sniff your balls!
3. Ålesund, Norway.
4. The architecture of Brasilia.
I like modernism. The view from the Rio Christ statue is pretty good too.
5. The architecture of Helsinki.
Kind of follows!
6, Macchu Picchu, seen properly. Or maybe Lalibela?
Now the former is too full of crowds, I suspect.
7. Swiss Alps, including the integration of natural beauty, landscape, and human footprint.
Get a car, don’t talk yourself into the train only.
8. Sikh Golden Temple and surrounding site, Amritsar, Punjab.
9. Niagara Falls.
10. Ginza district, Tokyo.
11. Singapore, Marina Bay Sands area, most of all the view from the Infinity Pool, looking out in all directions.
Other contenders: Istanbul on the water, view from the Eiffel Tower, Yunnan province in China, average quality of beauty in New Zealand, the new parts of Copenhagen and also Hamburg on the waterfront, cruising in Mexico City, the very old parts of Rome, Venice in a fast water boat, Marrakesh, Busan, Korea, Faroe Islands, many different parts of Chile including Patagonia, random geothermal parts of Iceland.
I am sure I have forgotten plenty!
Emergent Ventures, 22nd cohort
Emily Karlzen, Arizona, Founder and CEO of Arch Rift, to develop an astronaut helmet for commercial space flight.
Mehran Jalali, for building energy storage systems, NYC, grew up in Iran.
Kyle Redlinghuys, a further award, recently launched an API to make the data from the James Webb Space Telescope available.
Pranav Myana, 18, University of Texas, Austin, working on incorporating renewable power into the grid.
Brian Chau, Waterloo (Canada), general career support for writing and podcasting. Here is his Substack.
Cathal J. Nolan, historian, Boston University, to write a book on the relationship between war and progress. Just learned he was born in Dublin.
Cynthia Haven, Stanford University, to write a book on John Milton and the 17th century. Twitter here.
Harsehaj Dhami, 17, lives in Ontario, to visit a Longevity conference in Copenhagen. LinkedIn here.
Jackson Oswalt, Knoxville, builds things, AR/XR stuff, for general career support. In the Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a nuclear fusion reaction at age 12.
Miguel Ignacio Solano and Maria Elena Solano, Bogota/Cambridge, MA, co-founders of VMind, an artificial intelligence project.
Brian Kelleher, 18, Dublin, to improve software for doctors.
Devon Zuegel, to develop a new village and community, Twitter here.
Rodolfo Herrera, Pensamiento Libre, market-oriented Facebook and YouTube videos for Mexico.
Alia Abbas, 19, Maryland, to study biochemistry and materials and for general career development.
There are two other projects not yet ready for public announcement.
Ukraine tranche: There is now a new Emergent Ventures Ukraine.
Julia Brodsky, Maryland, former instructor of astronauts. To support educational efforts to teach on-line STEM and other subjects to Ukrainian children in refugee camps.
Uliana Ronska, 17, Prague and Netherlands currently. She is doing research on problems of triangulating fast-moving stars. It was also under her leadership that her team won ExPhO, CETO, and 2 all-Ukrainian Motion physics olympiads. For general career development.
Demian Zhelyabovskyy, currently at Bromsgrove School in the UK, from Kyiv. Last year he won first place in the All-Ukrainian Physics Marathon; also he and his teammates won the Experimental Physics Olympiad (ExPhO) and Computer Experiment Team Olympiad (CETO). For general career support, and for the physics paper he is currently co-authoring.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, representing the Kyiv School of Economics, to nurture talent development for Ukraine. Tymofiy as an individual was also the very first Emergent Ventures winner.
Congratulations to all, I am honored to be working with you!
Tuesday assorted links
2. German wives listen more to German husbands than vice versa.
4. Haiti is truly collapsing. Yet few people wish to talk about what happens when a nation-state is no longer a viable nation-state.
5. What is going wrong in Principles classes?
6. Part of why I think AGI will prove difficult, namely that human use their whole body to compute.
8. Good review of Vesper, a good movie on the big screen.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Why liberalism needs religion.
2. There is more in the Chips and Science Act than you might think.
3. Yana on Mises on socialism.
4. How to reduce the impact of fossil fuels on electricity prices.
5. Podcast with Deirdre McCloskey on being trans.
7. Single payer advocates can’t bring themselves to admit that the NHS essentially has collapsed.
Sunday assorted links
1. Good conversations have lots of doorknobs.
2. Scenario planning for a Taiwan invasion and defense.
3. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has passed away.
4. Cooling technologies Pakistani markets in everything.
5. Medieval medicine under the spotlight.
6. “The Latest Innovation in Beer Is Water in a Can” (WSJ).
What should I ask Katherine Rundell?
She is the author of the splendid new book on John Donne, reviewed by me here. More generally, here is from Wikipedia:
Katherine Rundell (born 1987) is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, and Seriously….and Private Passions.
Rundell’s other books include The Girl Savage (2011), released in 2014 in a slightly revised form as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms in the United States where it was the winner of the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children’s book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.
And this:
…all her books, and her play, contain a joke at Belgium’s expense…
She is also an avid roofwalker, and more. Here is Katherine eating a tarantula.
So what should I ask her?
Friday assorted links
1. The dissolution of the monasteries.
2. “By my count, at least 29 of the 605 NBA players who saw the court last season had fathers who played in the league—almost 5 percent, a ludicrously high figure, and enough to fill two teams’ rosters.” About Bronny.
3. Trends for U.S. water infrastructure.
4. “Considering that it predates the Bank of Ireland and the State itself, it could even be said that Guinness is the longest-running successful large institution in Ireland.” Link here.
6. Bryan Caplan does stand-up comedy at the Comedy Cellar.
7. Is Google making the internet more boring? An interesting piece.
There is No Such Thing as Development Economics
I used to think there was such a thing as development economics. There are still richer and poorer countries, of course, but is there a “development economics,” a special type of economics for poor countries? I don’t think so. Maybe there once was. In the twentieth century, divergence in per-capita GDP increased big time and it was a burning question why poor countries weren’t on the same development path as the developed nations. Starting around 1990-2000, however, we have seen convergence. Most countries are now on the same path. Poorer countries and richer countries are becoming more alike, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. I tweeted the following news headline recently:
Notice the commentary on NYC infrastructure but also the man bites dog angle. In Pakistan people on social media are apparently sharing videos of flooding in the New York subway to complain about the poor state of infrastructure in Pakistan!
My own anecdote fit the pattern. This week I am in Delhi and due to a series of unfortunate supply chain shocks at my house-build in the US, for the first time in 3 weeks I have running hot water and reliable internet access! Not only that but although India has sadly fallen for the paper straw nonsense the top hotels remain free from flow constrictors so the water gushes out of the shower with elan just as God intended. Civilization is truly moving back east.
More generally, poorer and richer countries face many of the same problems today: infrastructure, low-skill workers and technological change, climate adaption and so forth. Is the latest paper on cash transfers, pollution, or corruption about a poor country or a rich country? It’s hard to tell. Poor countries still have their own unique problems, of course, but those problems are best analyzed by country rather than by income category. India is not the same as Thailand or Peru. I see little that unites poor countries under the rubric development economics.
Saturday assorted links
1. More on the rise and fall of mobile home manufacturing.
3. “Sun-drenched Texas — not exactly known for its bleeding-heart liberals — has nearly triple the solar capacity this summer than it had last summer.” Link here.
4. Billionaire wealth as a percentage of gdp, across countries.
Thursday assorted links
What I’ve been reading
1. Ian Morris, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History. None of the book is bad, and half is quite interesting. Think of the treatment as “Deep Roots for Brexit,” though willing to noodle over earlier and more interesting topics in history. From a good FT review by Chris Allnutt: “Morris succeeds in condensing 10,000 years into a persuasive and highly readable volume, even if there are moments that risk a descent into what he seeks to avoid: “a catalogue of men with strange names killing each other”, as historian Alex Woolf put it.” Now if only he would explain why their hot and cold water taps don’t run together…
2. Michel Houellebecq, Interventions 2020. Grumpy non-fiction essays, with plenty of naive anti-consumerism. You need to read them if you are a fan, but I didn’t find so much here of interest. I was struck by his nomination of Paul McCartney (!) as the most essential musician, with Schubert next in line. Mostly it is MH being contrary. He has earned the right, but he wasn’t able to make me care more.
3. Frank O’Connor, “Guests of the Nation.” One of the best short stories I have read, Irish. Can’t say any more without spoilers! 11 pp. at the link.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Has anyone done a systematic accounting of which Vietnam era fictional works have held up and which not? Maybe this one gets a B+? Not top drawer Le Guin, but good enough to read, and better yet if you catch the cross-cultural references and all the anthropological background works.
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, some cheap paperback edition. I did a quick, non-studied reread of this, in prep for the new Cambridge University Press reissue edition due out June 30, which has excellent notes and I will study and reread in more detail. One of the very best books! Not only is the story fully engaging and deeply humorous, but it is one of the seminal tracts on progress (largely skeptical), a blistering take on political correctness, wise on the virtues and pitfalls of travel, and one of the first novels to truly engage with science and politics and their interaction. Straussian throughout. Swift is one of the very greatest thinkers and writers and his output has held up remarkably well.
That was then, this is now, cryptocurrency edition
Nouriel Roubini, a blockchain basher who famously called Bitcoin “the mother of all bubbles,” is working to develop a suite of financial products including a tokenized asset intended to act as a “more resilient dollar” in the face of higher inflation, climate change and civil unrest.
Roubini, nicknamed “Dr. Doom” for his bearish views, sees room for an asset-backed digital coin that could help protect against higher prices and benefit from soaring demand for land and commodities, as well as a loss of confidence in fiat currencies. He’s working with Dubai-based Atlas Capital Team LP, which he joined two years ago as co-founder and chief economist, to create the new products.
In doing so, Roubini is tapping into growing concerns over the pace of inflation as well as speculation about the longer-term outlook for the dollar, with prominent financial voices including Bridgewater Associates LP’s Ray Dalio and Credit Suisse AG strategist Zoltan Pozsar having argued the U.S. currency risks gradually losing its reserve status.
The greenback’s lofty position could be in jeopardy as the U.S. “prints too much money and adversaries start de-dollarizing,” Roubini said in an interview. “We recognized that America’s dollar reserve currency could be at risk and are working to create a new instrument that’s effectively a more resilient dollar.”
Unlike many cryptocurrencies, Roubini stresses that the coin would be backed by real assets — a mix of short-term U.S. Treasuries, gold and U.S. property (in the form of Real Estate Investment Trusts, or Reits) that’s expected to be less affected by climate change.
Here is more from Bloomberg. Here are earlier writings of relevance. I’m all for new business ventures, but perhaps he has the inflation timing wrong on this one? In any case, welcome Nouriel to the Austrian School of Economics!
I Hate Paper Straws!
I am interviewed by James Pethokoukis at his substack Faster, Please! Here’s one Q&A:
JP: American political debates are generally more interested in redistribution than long-term investment for future innovation. What are the incentives creating that problem and can they be fixed?
A big part of the incentive problem is that future people don’t have the vote. Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
We could solve many more of our problem if both sides stowed some of their cultural agendas to focus on areas of agreement. I think, for example, that we could solve the climate change problem with a combination of a revenue neutral carbon tax and American ingenuity. Nuclear, geo-thermal, hydrogen–these aren’t just clean fuels they are better fuels! Unfortunately, instead of focusing on innovation we get a lot of nonsense about paper straws and low-flow showers. I hate paper straws and low-flow showers! There is a wing of the environmental movement that wants to punish consumerism, individualism, and America more than they want to solve environmental problems so they see an innovation agenda as a kind of cheating. Retribution is the goal of their practice.
In contrast, what I want is for all of us to use more water, more energy and yes more plastic straws and also have a better environment. That’s the American way.
Subscribe to Faster, Please! for more.
Wednesday assorted links
That was then, this is now, again Russia/Ukraine edition
Circa 1919, with Ukraine under siege from the Bolshevik armies:
Things, however, did not soon improve. Again to take the case of Odessa, by the end of April electricity was running out. “Thus in one month they have brought chaos to everything,” Bunin snarled, “no factories, no railroads, no trams, no water, no bread, no clothes — no nothing!” In fact the Bolsheviks had inherited the chaos and the crisis; they also inherited — and exacerbated — the free-wheeling brutality displayed on all sides and of which…they were the beneficiaries. To this kind of panache they applied a new moral calculus.
That is from Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914-1921, which as noted yesterday is quite a good book, especially for viewing the Bolshevik Revolution through the eyes of what became the broader Soviet empire.