There’s pretty much no way a $100,000 car can be more environmentally friendly than a $20,000 car. This is true irrespective of the way in which the cars are powered. If you buy a $100,000 car, you put $100,000 into the economy. That is, $100,000 becomes available to the manufacturer’s suppliers and employees to buy stuff, and there’s no reason that this money will be spent in a more environmentally friendly way than any other $100,000 that goes into the economy.

I think the only way to make the purchase of a $100,000 car environmentally friendly is to buy a $20,000 car, and burn $80,000. At least that way you get rid of $80,000 that would otherwise be used to consume stuff.

(If an electric car ends up being cheaper over its lifetime (i.e. including fuel/power) then it will be more environmentally friendly than its gas-powered equivalent. But I don’t think this would ever apply to the Tesla Roadster.)

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”

Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they’re diehard Askers.

The quotes, and the idea for the dichotomy itself, come from an ask.metafilter.com answer, which is well worth reading in full. (And the original question too, for context.)

Between the wars, however, international sport became, as George Orwell soon recognized, an expression of national struggle, and sportsmen representing their nation or state, primary expressions of their imagined communities. This was the period when the Tour de France came to be dominated by national teams, when the Mitropa Cup set leading teams of the stares of Central Europe against cach other, when the World Cup was introduced into world football, and, as 1936 demonstrated, when the Olympic Games unmistakably became occasions for competitive national self-assertion. What has made sport so uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events for males, is the ease with which even the least political or public individuals can identify with the nation as symbolized by young persons excelling at what practically every man wants, or at one time in life has wanted, to be good at. The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even the one who only cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself.

A small part of the profile discusses McChrystal’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties, and briefly mentions a suggestion for a tantalising new military medal: a medal for “courageous restraint” to be awarded, I suppose, to soldiers who could’ve opened fire, but chose not to. It seems weird for an award to be given out in such circumstances, but this thought puzzles me, since of such an act of omission could of course be a moment of great valour. Does any military make such awards? To individuals taking on personal danger, in order to lessen the risk to others?

I, unfortunatly [sic], invite you to come back to me in a few weeks, or better months, maybe after the summer, if it is calm in our work, I think it is better to come back around Christmas.

Timelines slip from “in a few weeks” to “Christmas” in one sentence! (It is perhaps a measure of how much I like them that I still wholeheartedly recommend gandi.net. Although I would like 64-bits before Christmas…)

Anyway, part of this argument is a table showing how long in took for news of significant events to reach London. I thought this pretty interesting in itself–we’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to go around the world now, and even when reading history you usually get the impression that events were known immediately. (The dramatic speeding up of news reports around 1880 was a result of the invention and deployment of the telegraph.)

• That drugs were illegal
• Eating meat
• Privacy
• Our lack of racism
• Religious overtolerance
• Monogamy (or anti-polygamy)
• Nationalism
• Nudity and Pornography taboos
• Charging money for information
• Representative democracy over direct democracy
• Our aversion to eugenics or designer babies
• Imprisonment vs. rehabilitation

Some thoughts:

• eating meat – I think this will be difficult to score because we’ll probably mostly be eating artificial meat. (It will be cheaper, more environmentally responsible, healthier and cleaner.) My guess is that some people will still eat “real meat” for various reasons (prefer taste, can afford it, connection with the past, squeamish about the artificial stuff), but that there won’t be much outrage about this because so few people will be doing it.
• charging for information – I very much doubt they would find this appalling. It’s quite likely that we won’t pay for information in the same way that we do now, but I think future generations would see why things now are arranged the way they are. (Historical reasons, because it’s possible to.)
• attitude toward the poor – This is one thing we could be doing much more about, but aren’t. I reckon we’ll get smacked by future generations for this.

Appaloosa–Western with Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger. (Curiously the inflight movie guide listed Viggo Mortensen as the one star.) Meanders a bit too much (in plot and character development), but adequate. Mortensen wears some interesting double buttoned shirts.

Last week I went to see the Palladio Exhibition at the Royal Academy. It hasn’t received very good reviews, and I have no reason to disagree with the reviewers, but one of the things that bugged me about it though was something I’ve not seen mentioned in the reviews: the really poor writing and explanations. I would say most recent exhibitions have disappointed. (One happy exception was Olafur’s Eliasson’s artist statement at the beginning of the boat tour of his NYC Waterfalls project–I don’t remember the details of what he said, but he managed to convey a whole lot of why and how (including a justification for why public money should be spent on the project) as well as deepen my appreciation for what he’d done and the art itself.)

Anyway, here’s the complete text of one panel from the Palladio exhibition (Palazzo Chiericati, 1550), interspersed with some comments:

In 1546 Girolamo Chiericati inherited a few old houses on a narrow site on the west side of the Piazza dell’Isola, in the east of Vicenza. The open area, which was bounded on two sides by rivers, accommodated the city’s river port and its cattle and timber markets. Having advocated Palladio as the architect for the Basilica, in 1550 Chiericati commissioned him to build a new palazzo on the land.

What do you mean “accommodated the city’s river port and its cattle and timber markets”? “Accommodate” means “to hold without crowding or inconvenience.” (At least I think this is the way “accommodate” is being used.) And it’s typically applied to animate things, or at least things that can move. You can accomodate (some number of) guests or ships; you don’t accomodate single things that can’t move, like a port or a market.

Palladio’s design made a virtue of an unpromising, severely constrained site, and he eventually delivered a building that demonstrated that he had reached full maturity.

The “eventually” is unnecessary, as well as being inaccurate since, as described below, the building wasn’t complete until over one hundred years after construction commenced–well after Palladio’s death. And in what was did the building demonstrate that Palladio had “reached full maturity”? How about just one example of his maturity, or evidence that this is a widely held belief?

In order to gain additional residential space, Chiericati petioned the city council for permission to use a strip of land 4.64 metres wide in front of the site, for the portico of his new building.

Irrelevant! I don’t care that Chiericati’s manoeuvring opened up more space at the front of the building. The historical importance of the building has nothing to do with planning permission.

On the piano nobile (first floor), additional space was gained for the grand sala, which was flanked by two loggias; while on the ground floor, a public facility was provided, a colonnaded walkway opening onto the piazza.

Where did this “additonal space” come from? Is it something to do with the portico? How is walkway a “public facility” and what does this mean anyway? (Especially poor punctuation in this sentence, as well.)

The double-order loggia topped with a row of statues, derived in part from recently published reconstructions of the Roman Forum, combined with the projecting sala on the piano nobile, confirmed the design of the palazzo as entirely innovative, and demonstrated Palladio’s knowledge of ancient Roman prototypes and his recognition of the importance of the new urban palazzo.

What a bad sentence. What was “derived in part”? The statues themselves? The idea for a “double-order loggia topped with a row of statues”? The “confirm” in “confirmed the design of the palazzo…” is wrong-headed. In this sense, “confirm” means to remove doubt about something believed or suspected to be true–but in this case there is no doubt, no theory. If this particular feature is innovative, say that! Finally, I don’t see how this feature provides any evidence for or against Palladio recognising the “importance of the new urban palazzo.”

With its view from the first floor of the loggia to the countryside beyond, Palazzo Chiericati also made reference to the suburban villa, which Palladio was later to address at the Villa Foscari (‘La Malcontenta’) on the Brenta and the Villa Almerico Capra (Villa Rotonda) outside Vicenza.

Really awkward. Palladio “made reference to the suburban villa” with a view to the countryside? Huh? And what is Palladio addressing, exactly? You can only address an issue or problem, which a house isn’t.

Girolamo Chriericati died in 1558. His son, Valerio, chose to halt construction with only the first four bays on the left of the structure built. The palazzo remained unfinished for over a century but it was published as complete in the Quattro Libri, leading subsequent students of Palladio’s work, such as Inigo Jones, to be shocked to find it unrealised when they visited.

“Subsequent” is unnecessary. Saying “published as complete” either wrong, or too casual for academic writing: books are published, palazzos (the referent of “it”) aren’t. What’s wrong with “described as complete”, or “listed as complete”? Finally, if the building is so great, why wasn’t it completed? Maybe lack of money is the reason, but there could be other–and somewhat interesting reasons.

(Have been going through old photos; this is from August 2002.) Quite a lot of responses, despite not being about to spell.