SWCAMBORNE

It is roughly 660 miles from Ashland, Oregon to Pasadena, California and I am proof that you can easily drive it in a day. Even on an overcast day driving pretty hard there is plenty to see.

Mt Shasta

Sunset over the San Joaquin Valley

and plenty of Starbucks

See more photos on Flickr

A special shout out to Miles one of the brilliant staff at Valley View Auto Repair in Ashland, Oregon who against all odds replaced the clutch in Rebecca’s car and made my drive both possible and necessary.  Well done.

On the drive the mini went over 90,000 miles and this was its first new clutch.  I took a picture.

This song and the video of it were created by two young people who I had the privilege of tutoring in math many years ago.   Wow!

“It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.”

Matt Ridley, Author

The Rational Optimist (p. 12).

“When trying to decide a course of action, it is usually helpful to ask yourself,

What would Anne of Green Gables do?

From an intriguing  new book

The Fallback Plan

by Leigh Stein

It reminds me of the bumper sticker I bought at the Nixon Library:

Here is a link to a site that has the MONEY  CHART.   It is a remarkable creation.  If you are interested in information follow the link.  The internet is amazing.

The link in the clear:  http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-6432&y=-4336&z=2

Here is a screenshot of a large section:

And one of a detail:

Thanks to Rebecca B for this one.

“It did seem as if they hated me, or at least felt that antagonistic indignation that can be pulled off so well on the Internet.”

Mike Brown

Cal Tech Astronomy Professor and author of:

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

I just finished The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson.  He has an interesting new spin on the current financial crisis.  I again failed in my quest to find a way to guarantee the preservation of assets at this point in the economic cycle.

When I ran Brandon (1981-2003) I was often asked how a current financial crisis (Mexico, Asia or Carters stagflation for instance) would effect our business.  My response was that financial shocks were like the giant ground swell waves in the ocean.  We would rise and fall along with everyone else to those.  What concerned me, because we were such a small boat, was the Chop.  The little waves that could capsize us or one of our major customers, technologies or suppliers.  How we acted could effect or results relative to the Chop.

I also used to say since we can’t effect the broad economy why bother to pay much attention to it.  Colloquially I put it: “Don’t try to effect the weather.  Just bring along an umbrella.

I suppose putting these two together I should spend less time paying attention to global finance and politics and more time making local investments.  Good idea.  Now I need to think about Chaos theory as explained in Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin and how it applies to this idea.

Capirotada is a book about Nogales written by Alberto Rios.  Capirotada is also a Mexican bread pudding.  Read the book and you will learn about food and the border and immigrants.

Here is my review on Amazon:

Capirotada is a special book.  Its simplicity moved me and the small stories that it told helped me feel how Nogales was in the 1950’s and 60’s.  I usually find memoirs to be too orderly for literature and to self-serving for nonfiction. This one is different.  Rios’s memoir is beautiful literature.

Alberto Rios writes in the same way that a great abstract painter paints.  He draws an outline and leaves blank spaces.  He admits that he doesn’t know things.  The pieces that he puts in are enough so that you can accept the unknowns and the uncertainties of his life or yours and just see enough of the picture so you can feel how it was without knowing everything.

Capirotada is brilliantly written book that is a marvelous tribute to his parents, to Nogales, and to immigrants everywhere.

I bough the book many years ago and found it the other day while looking for another book with a map of Tijuana.  I was going to send it to Maria Sedgewick since she lives and works in Nogales but I read a few pages and was captivated.  I ended up with four connections to the book.  Rios’s mother came to the US from England on the same Cunard ship that I came on.  I was about six years behind her.  Rios teaches at ASU where the Changing Boundaries Map exhibit is currently and he has, according to his web site an interest in maps.  And finally there is our shared connection to Nogales.

In The Rational Optimist Matt Ridley make a terrific case that what make human’s special is our propensity to share, specialize and trade.  As a result of this propensity we have created a virtual shared brain that has allowed us to build a world of freedom and prosperity for humans that was inconceivable even two hundred years ago.

The book is easy to read and is chock full of quotes and ideas that will cause latter day Malthusians to cringe.

Examples:

• It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.
• The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
• Never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
• There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.
• The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
• The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero.
• The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade.
• Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
• Indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last.
• The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity.
• I Highly recommend this book!

Jessie Seiler writes about Bean Sandwiches in Senegal and makes you want to try them.  Great writing.