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This is me, try­ing to record a few off­hand obser­va­tions, and ridicu­lously try to link them to larger social trends and stereo­types, aside from the stuff every­body already knows, e.g. the habit of dri­ving on the wrong side of the road.

Climate Change

Air con­di­tion­ing sim­ply isn’t used as much here in London; the indoors are kept a few degrees (F) warmer than I am used to in Chicago, which has a sim­i­lar (out­doors) climate.

I’d expect that if I stayed here I’d sweat off about 10 lbs just doing stan­dard office work, which could explain how the aver­age frailty here is notice­ably higher.

A Can of Coke

SI mea­sure­ments mean a can of pop is 330ml, which is just shy of 11.2 oz. In the US, it’s a 12oz can. That’s about 12 calo­ries less sugar per-can, which would be another rea­son why peo­ple here are thinner.

Metropolitan

Holy Christ as a cracker.

So here’s the thing: U.S. cities are mostly planned and Cartesian; they’re on a grid. It may not be per­fect, but you can expect big long streets that run the length of the city, cross-streets that cut over, and a few excep­tions that cut diag­o­nally to help you get from A — C with­out going north to B, then over to C. Once and a while, a street will dead-end for some rea­son, and you’ll have to go around the block, or up and over a few to find an under­pass beneath the express­way or avoid a one-way sec­tion of a street.

And for you native Bostonians, I rec­om­mend you come visit your cousins in Chicago and you’ll see what I mean… Hell, even Newark has a grid.

You can also expect the num­bers to count up coher­ently: if I say that Madison and State are (0,0), and I live on 1800 N. Wells, you can fig­ure out pretty eas­ily how to get from Madison and State to my house by glanc­ing at a map. The only infor­ma­tion that isn’t encoded in the address is the X axis of Wells, which means that once I know 2D geom­e­try (which every­one is taught the first year of High School), the only addi­tional cog­ni­tive load required to find my way to any given address is the miss­ing coör­di­nate of the street the address is on. I have to learn that Wells = 200 West, that x = –200. And that’s some­thing you can learn once and never for­get. If I do have to detour for some rea­son, I know that I’ve cut over to Clark, which is 100 West, and can get back most any time I want.

Not so in London, at least Tower Hill, which is where my hotel is. Without some kind of map, it isn’t even pos­si­ble to dis­cern that you’re headed the wrong direc­tion — even Sol has deserted you in your quest. The clos­est ana­logue I can imag­ine is that some mad fiend has turned the heart of a major met­ro­pol­i­tan area into the cul-de-sac hell that is restricted to the sub­urbs in the US.

I’m not say­ing that Hell is wrong, but I can turn left twice and still end up trav­el­ling the same direc­tion, because the streets all curve and stop after a block or two. Just sayin’

This also means that cab­bies here have a tremen­dous racket, as they can legit­i­mately mean­der around a neigh­bor­hood try­ing to find a street which only exists for a block or two. It also means that no mat­ter where you are, where you’re going, or how you’re get­ting there, it will take you about an hour.

Transit Costs

The Underground is 2.3x more expen­sive than the CTA. Yes, things are much more posh, and London is more expen­sive in gen­eral, but it costs me 6 USD, rather than 2.5 USD to get anywhere.

Cheers

“Thanks, you’re a dia­mond, babe” is not some­thing you’d ever hear in the U.S. for let­ting some­one bum a smoke. (Well, maybe Boystown.) I tend to worry that I come across as some­thing of an ogre for the busi­nesslike, give-nothing-away, “thanks” I’m used to. We’re not ass­holes, we just play poker.

Update: If you’re tempted to take offense, please recall these are tongue-in-cheek, touristy obser­va­tions of a con­fessed business-traveling Chicagoan who actu­ally did enjoy him­self, par­tic­u­larly on Brick Road the night before he left.

I dis­cov­ered a bit from Clay Shirky, talk­ing about how tele­vi­sion was the way post-griminess indus­trial soci­ety chose to cope with free time. Included was the bit that enough time is wasted watch­ing tele­vi­sion to pro­duce all of Wikipedia 2000 times over.

Something to say…

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
184 svn
165 ls
101 cd
96 ldapsearch
95 ssh
62 vim
25 ping
24 grep
23 sudo
20 rm

Thank you to the Sci-Fi Channel (and/or who­ever ends up own­ing them) for get­ting it and let­ting me down­load BSG off your web­site in a flash thing.

Also, Scott Ian is the moth­er­fuckin’ man, though I think Baltar is very clearly sup­posed to be a Factured Fairlytales ver­sion of Jesus (the beard was the giv­away, I thought).

Update: Turns out Sci-Fi is owned by NBC Universal, who in turn is owned by GE (80%) and Vivendi (20%).

I’m cur­rently suf­fer­ing from putting my insom­nia to good use (so far I’ve installed Tracks), so I’ll take the time to post some ran­dom thoughts:

• I was bit­ten by April Fools twice today. The sec­ond time because I was too exhausted to remem­ber that it was April Fools.
• A life with­out hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life with­out reli­gion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you lis­ten to what peo­ple say care­fully, they will give them­selves away at some point. Like most wis­dom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of con­fir­ma­tion of this and lit­tle contradiction.
• I think a fair num­ber of peo­ple like to dom­i­nate oth­ers with their words. Being on the receiv­ing end of that kind of thing is really exhaust­ing. I think it’s fairly obvi­ously just peo­ple play­ing out their psy­chodra­mas in an envi­ron­ment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monop­o­lies on cul­ture, art, and media in gen­eral sti­fle cre­ativ­ity, limit free­dom, and exist to pro­tect one power against another. In this soci­ety it’s almost always used to pro­tect the estab­lished power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those orga­ni­za­tions we may oth­er­wise sup­port. That pinched-face dis­com­fort you are feel­ing is cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance between your stated pref­er­ences and your desire to defend your principles.