Nice
My little brother just made his way back from a (self funded) trip to explore India and do some research in Nepal.
He’s taken a copius amount of notes on the intersection of economics and architecture in that part of the world. Should be putting a blog together on the trip soon.
Crashing Tehran’s Electricity Grid
NYT –
A flier circulating in Tehran, for example, asked people to turn on all their electrical appliances at the same time to crash the electric grid as a sign of defiance.
Black Market Energy Acquisition
Makes its way onto domestic soil.
Ten people have been arrested in the theft of about $2 million worth of oil and gas condensate from oil companies and producers in West Texas.
Suspects stole about 8,000 barrels of oil in one month alone.
Filling Up The Intellectual Pipeline
Catching up on the William Gibson canon among other books and movies.
Read Spook Country a while ago (systema is plain awesome), recently finished Pattern Recognition, and just started Virtual Light a couple hours ago. Also, picked up John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information. And finally, River of Gods by Ian McDonald (an interesting futurethink on India at 100 years).
Saw Steamboy (great visuals) and Transformers 2 (a nice take on symbiotic robot/man warfare). At some point, I still have to see Ghost in the Shell (+2, SAC etc).
Review: Half Price Books
Old hat to Austinites, but there’s a great little chain in town called Half Price Books. Indeed, every paperback they sell is for 50% off the cover price. Hardcovers are seemingly randomly priced.
More interestingly, they also have a pretty cool system to buy books from you (at a fraction of the cost). You bring in a box of books to a counter in the back, they require that you stay in the store, and then they offer you a price (no bargaining). Then you take the offer to the front. By this point, you’ve picked up several more books and their devious vector plotting has paid off.
Not a cash cow by any means (I just got rid of ~30 books and earned a whopping $10), but the selection is pretty good given the nature of the community, the prices are sometimes comparable with Amazon/Half.com.