EclecticLip

Finally posted a bunch of content on my to-post list, from various mailouts… namely, this, that, the other, the other other, and the other-other other…  five down, about fifty to go (and most of those from long, long ago…)

(Originally written March 15.  Posted March 28) 

We’re back from the Diamond Capital of North America(tm), with tales of our quartz-priced travels and gypsum-level accomodations. 

On the flight over, I was struck by the vast expanse of the north — most of the landscape was as empty as the mind of a Zen adept.  It was astonishing, thrilling in a way, to see an entire landscape under the horizon, unoverrun by civilization and unblemished by the mark of man.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the oil sands from 35000 feet, but sadly Fort MacMurray and its environs were crowded over.  So much for seeing one of the “7 eyesores of the industrial world” with my own eyes.*

The first thing I noticed when stepping off the plane and into the frosty frontier, was that the airport was very small.  You walk off a ramp onto the tarmac and into the terminal building.  Mind you, Yellowknife does have a third small baggage conveyor, to Whitehorse’s two.  And it’s got bilingual ads at the airport — English and Japanese!  Playing to the tourist base, the audio tour of the legislative assembly building is also available in Japanese, as well as the expected English, French, and nine other official languages of the territory.  While there seemed to be more Japanese folks in Yellowknife than Aussies at Whistler, it’s apparently a big draw for German tourists too.  Which means *both* sides of my family tree predisposed me to visit.  In a sense, it may have been my genetic destiny!  (That and invading Russia…  hmm, maybe it’s an Arctic wanderlust thing.)

Back to the igloo-esque legislature building: it’s open on weekends, staffed by a volunteer and a security guard.  Built in 1993, it’s the first permanent legislative building for the Territories.  Prior legislatures met in the ballrooms of Yellowknife hotels, with occasional “road trips” hither and yon; maybe an attempt to neutralize the Yellowknifers’ home field advantage.    The NWT flag was actually designed by a Manitoba high schooler, who in 1969 won $1000 for his inspiration, about thirty times what graphic design student Caroline Davidson was paid three years later, for designing the Nike Swoosh.  (To Phil Knight’s credit — did I just write that? — he later gave her an envelope-full of Nike stock.)

Fair to say that things are pretty relaxed up in the Territories — someone outside can look all the way into the legislative chamber while they’re in session.  Reinforcing this impression, the security guard at the offices of Joint Task Force North told me that, even though the Canadian Forces were a “diet Coke of a military” he was “pretty sure” the building didn’t offer tours.  He then suggested a couple tourist venues I might consider visiting during my stay.

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* this is my list, in no particular order; readers’ private lists may vary:

- Ohio’s pride, the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire a record thirteen times over the years  
      (note: since cleaned up)
      (note 2: I sure hope that’s a record…)

- the great manure lagoons of the factory farms of the American midwest

- the Yanacocha Mine in Peru: a “cyanide fortified” open pit gold mine as big as the tax havens where its investors probably hide their winnings: bigger than Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it’s a whisker smaller than the Cayman Islands

- the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch         (filed in Wikipedia under that very name!) 

- the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 
      (note: in the quarter-century since 300,000 people were evacuated, wildlife seem to be thriving there)

- Alberta’s oil sands tailing ponds

- Exxon Headquarters in Texas - scientific illiteracy central

(incidentally, three score and ten years before Exxon started funding global warming deniers, the President of Union Oil bankrolled the publication and distribution of three million copies of the first American Christian Fundamentalist tracts.  Fun guys, those oil barons…)

(Originally written March 18; posted April 10) 

One of the first things you see at Yellowknife’s airport is that the diamond ads are bilingual — that’s English and Japanese.  I noticed a slight difference between them, though… 

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(originally written March 17.  Posted March 28) 

The recent issue of TIME magazine included a scribbling by someone named Reihan Salam.  His article “The Dropout Economy” is somewhat sensationalistic and largely unnoteworthy, except for the fact that it directly references the writings of a guy named John Robb, whose ideas on “resilient communities” were footnoted in the article I co-wrote for McKinsey last year, on the future of energy.

Which means that my company’s thought leadership is a full year ahead of the curve of TIME magazine’s ever-shrinking readership.  And based on a quick search of The Economist’s website, they haven’t even heard of the term. 

Robb — a former US Air Force guy who helped mainstream RSS feeds — posits that due to a confluence of factors (financial, demographic, technological) the nation-state is going to be under tremendous pressure in the coming decades.  As a result, communities will reorient themselves to resiliency as opposed to efficiency.  (His blog is here.)

This might be best understood through analogies:

- Redmond’s Technosaurus Rex beat out its corporate competition in the PC era.  But its dominance has eroded in the face of competition from decentralized, ad hoc open-source code.  (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and others)

- humans are the dominant animals: with our tools, we can overcome any creature we run into in sky, street or sea.  But we don’t look so kingly compared to bacteria: they can develop immunity to our antibiotics faster than we can invent new ones

- the US is the world’s hyperpower: it can overwhelm all its rival nation-states.  But like all countries, it’s struggling to deal with threats from terrorist cells, which can be small enough to “fly under the radar” of the traditional defense mechanisms (police, armed forces)

In the past half-century at least, there’s been a strong advantage for communities and countries to be organized on the basis of efficiency, at the expense of resiliency.  As such, our world is one of faraway power plants and overseas supply chains.  Like Robb, I think the pendulum is swinging (for at least a couple decades) towards resiliency; it will be seen as advantageous enough, even if it seems more expensive than efficiency.  And *that* creates the kind of opening that fuel cells and other on-site power generation technologies can richly exploit. :)

(originally written March 3.  Posted March 28) 

Toyota’s recent quality troubles brought a section to mind from Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War — the indispensible resource for generals and armchair generals alike. ;)  (I decided not to cover cover Sun Tzu in our work book club, ’cause it’s just a bit too abstract.  “Birds rising in flight are a sign of ambush” doesn’t really translate well to the 21st-century tech business scene.    )

Chapter 5 talks about the proper use of “shi” (roughly analogous to potential energy, or momentum) in battle.  A skilful general uses this to their advantage, only launching major attacks when they’ve got momentum.  Correspondingly, you do not engage an opponent when they’ve got the big Mo and you don’t.

I was recently pointed to articles by “lean manufacturing” advocates in past years, grumbling that Toyota had stopped walking the walk.  But they maintained their momentum — their positive brand image and environmental “halo” from the Prius — and so were relatively invulnerable, until the recent recalls emerged.  As such, arguments from American manufacturers about their near-parity in quality that would’ve fallen on deaf ears… now have an audience.  And funnily enough, Hyundai’s goal of catching up to Toyota in quality may be achieved a few years early, thanks to Toyota “catching down” to everyone else in the pack. 

Apple was able to take advantage of the Vista fiasco with its Mac-PC ads, which wouldn’t've been as effective if they were targeting XP, which worked adequately.  And Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” campaign won’t get traction until Apple mis-steps or Microsoft someone manages to get some wind in its sails.  From a fuel cell perspective, any attacks on battery-electric vehicles will be ineffectual, ’cause they’re The New Hotness right now.  It’ll only be when the first missteps come that the message will firmly click that fuel cell vehicles and battery-electrics fill complementary (not competitive) niches.

On a bigger scale, the Anglo-American economic model (the “Chicago school” of Milton Friedman) rightly or wrongly largely had the run of the road for the past thirty years.  Past arguments that, say, the Nordic model is more effective (deftly avoiding the traps of traditional right- and left-wing economic theory) fell largely on deaf ears — but are likely to get a broader audience now.  As to whether they get a broad enough audience, that remains open to question.

Riffing on Sun Tzu, I’m reminded of the common misquotation, “the Chinese term for crisis is composed of the characters danger + opportunity”.  It’s actually more along the lines of “danger + crucial point”.  And the latter definitely describes the current macroeconomic situation, with ominous challenges of debt and demographics in many jurisdictions.
           

(Note: originally written March 3.  Posted March 27.) 

Aya was lucky enough to get some tickets to watch the Japanese women’s curling team in action. So we attended the round-robin tournament, where eight loudly-shouting teams played four simultaneous games, a hearty crowd cheered them on, and public service announcements asked people to turn their cellphones off. A big round of applause went to the curling fan who dressed in body paint, briefs and a Canadian flag cape, with a poster reading “marry me Cheryl Bernard”. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so for the sake of brevity I attached one below.

Keeping with the scattershot illogic of imperial units, each curling team gets 73 minutes to throw their stones, which weigh 41 pounds each (plus or minus three).  These are prime numbers!  Consider that 40 pounds makes for a nice round number, with 42 pounds being “three stone” in the archaic British system. 

And 75 minutes would’ve made a lot of sense (games would cap out at 2.5 hours, max, not including breaks).  How did these people colonize most of the world?!?  The maximum length of a game — counting both teams’ time-budgets, the two complimentary one-minute timeouts, and thirteen minutes of resting time between rounds — turns out to 163 minutes.  Another prime number!
 
Incidentally, Canada House had a curling stone from 1535 on display.  It was recovered from the bottom of a lake in Scotland.  Clearly, the playoffs ran a bit long that year.   

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(click to enlarge)

(Note: originally written March 3.  Posted March 27) 

Now that the Olympics are over, and I’ve sworn off lineups until… oh, the next Lady Gaga concert, I have some Olympic tales, which I shall hereby recount. ’cause I’m a sharing kind of guy.

Now, I was one of the crazy not-so-few who lined up for the free Zipline strung across Robson Square, braving the elements and getting to know my line-neighbours. As it turns out, one of the people in front of me was a biologist; we chatted about the recent true-colour dinosaur rendition in National Geographic, based on a scanning-electron microscope comparison of modern feathers with ancient fossilized imprints. But mostly we commented on the folks behind us, who weren’t savvy enough to get in line two hours before the Zipline opened. :)

Thus it was that four bathroom-break-interrupted hours after I arrived, I got my eighteen seconds of fun, looking down on the cacophonous rabble as I sped by. Sort of a dinosaur’s-eye-view of Robson Square — if you were one of the bigger dinosaurs, that is. Running somewhere in a hurry. I repeated the experience two days later to reserve a place near the front of the line for, uh, someone who said she felt like sleeping in that morning.