Important discovery

Fluid dynamicists have worked out how to stop teapots from dribbling

"The problem with teapots is their annoying habit of dribbling, particularly at low rates of flow. The phenomenon has achieved such notoriety that it has been imaginatively dubbed the 'teapot effect'."

I'll try to write something about life in Ghana soon.

quick note of the day

On Italy: "After a century in which its ancient civilization has been hollowed out, Italy is nothing but a republic without virtue, living under the heel of a clapped-out Casanova."

signs of sclerotic state institutions/laws

6 separate taxes paid to receive personal mail if sent to a Ghana Post PO Box:
20.0% - Import duty
12.5% - VAT
02.5% - "Health Insurance Levy"
02.0% - "Social levy"
01.5% - Processing fee
00.5% - ECOWAS tax
=39% tax

+ 3 cedies post office handling fee (this may have been a bribe, not sure)

minor revelation

Despite a decade of imitation (ever more tired), the Libertines still sound fresh. No one has combined the modern guitar jangle of the Strokes -- who also aged surprisingly well, at least "is this it" and "room on fire" -- and the raw energy of the clash/sex pistols. And moments of quite beautiful poetic lyricism. Seriously, listen to them again.

Also, Mick Jones's production, what a godsend. Doesn't sacrifice their visceral sound (again, reaching for the adjective "raw") for the sake of smooth radio friendliness.

Edited: I'm an idiot, Mick Jones not Jagger.

At least someone important agrees with me

Finally Mervin King says what I've been thinking for a while: Proposed regulatory reforms will not prevent another financial crisis. Why aren't more people concerned about this?

The whole "better regulation" fallacy is enormously frustrating. The political commentary class always seems to think that we can solve a problem by having better/smarter regulatory oversight (implying that previously either people weren't given such responsibility, or that they were incompetent/negligent). But most of the time crises are caused by an "unknown unknown" (or black swan or whatever you wish). Regulators are not omniscient and they focus on preventing the causes of the last crisis, which is completely natural, but leads them to be blindsided by the future problem.

Does anyone really think that if we had had better regulation someone would have foreseen the mortgage crisis and stepped in? If thousands of people with huge financial incentives to do so failed, I doubt a regulator would. It's simply too difficult to divine the potential cause of problems in the future with complex systems. After all, central planning would work better if such regulation were possible (cf hayek / information asymmetry). And even if they had magically identified the problem, there would be enormous political obstacles to intervention, which would require causing clear short-term harm to avoid hypothetical long-term damage (accusations of crying wolf etc.).

So, what can / should we do? Instead of focusing on setting up more magic regulators, we need to have laws that structure the 'rules of the game' in a way that minimizes the potential for crises (e.g., reinstate the glass-steagal act). This is not to say that regulators have no useful role; it's just that "better regulatory oversight" is not going to avert a future financial crisis.

edit: And Volcker agrees with me too

Hark!

Wishing for Cambridge: Boston Tweed Ride



And more photos

Détente

After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations, I’ve finally secured an apparent stalemate in my battle with the apartment cleaning service. For weeks I’ve been trying – requesting, cajoling and begging – the service staff to reduce the level of service to no avail. I find it disconcerting to return to the apartment and have everything put away / cleaned up. I’d rather that they just change the towels and sheets every few days, and do nothing more. Maybe mop every couple of weeks. But, really, this is impossible. All I can manage to do is have the windows not opened (a pain when you want to just come back and turn the AC on) and to occasionally have staff refrain from putting away my things.

On the plus side, apparently the door for the freezer is coming soon. This is very important because the freezer is a unit within the refrigerator, so without a door the entire refrigerator is really a freezer, even at the lowest setting. My milk hasn’t melted in a week.

The Storm

Miles off, a storm breaks. It ripples to our room.
You look up into the light so it catches one side
Of your face, your tight mouth, your startled eye.
You turn to me and when I call you come
Over and kneel beside me, wanting me to take
Your head between my hands as if it were
A delicate bowl that the storm might break.
You want me to get between you and the brute thunder.
Settling on your flesh my great hands stir,
Pulse on you and then, wondering how to do it, grip.
The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens.
-Ian Hamilton


It's borderline disreputable to post poetry on a blog, but I'm hoping to introduce a few more people to Hamilton's work. I couldn't decide where to start, too many of his poems are profoundly moving, so I simply decided to post the first one I had encountered.

Education

Dinner yesterday with an interesting cross-section of Ghanaians and ex-pats, long discussion about development (or lack thereof). One comment highlighted an interesting point: In African developing countries, there is a far greater language barrier between the highly-educated class and non-educated (legacy of colonialism and multiplicity of local ethnic languages) than elsewhere. As a result, getting an education cleaves you from your roots/society…if you go to university, you enter a new class of people and are separated from your background. So it's not surprising that the ruling classes, insofar as they are the most educated, don't serve their people (no sense of solidarity to inspire noblesse oblige or similar civic duty).

That said, it's not like the 'men of the people' (zuma, imin) rulers have a good track record of serving society. And, furthermore, serving "society" could mean just serving your family / tribe rather than the nation, so -- on second thought -- it's probably stretching things to read development implications into the language/education barrier.

hopeful

“The guarantees given to Ireland are not guarantees. They were a political declaration in a style such that the Irish wolf filled its stomach and the Lisbon goat remained whole.” – Spokesman for Vaclav Klaus.

I would be tremendously happy if one obstinate old Czech manages to stifle the imperialist Europhile dream. Just think of de villepin’s impotent fury (how dare such a little nation etc.)

Most beautiful London morning I have ever

Long autumnal light and cold crisp air extend deep into the day, then softly close. Wandering around Westminster, cocooned by Vespertine and small besides the ornate white blocks. And in the evening the sky lit up with fluorescent clouds

In pursuit of randomized sampling

Over the weekend I visited coca farmers, monitoring the implementation of the Harvard fair trade survey I’ve been helping with. Made the terrible mistake of leaving Accra at 6pm, which led to an hour or more of traffic en route to the Achimoda bus station. From there took a tro-tro to the town of Kofiriduo (spelling wrong), about 3 hours away (should be less, but the minibus stopped by another city on the way).

From there it was another 20 minute tro-tro to the largest town near the farming community; the tro-tro deposited us at an empty gas station in the middle of nowhere a bit before 11 at night. Luckily the owner of our guesthouse was roused by phone and he eventually emerged from the darkness and led us back into the bush. Our resting place was a paleo-hacienda set amidst a half-dozen small 2-room houses in circle cluster, oddly reminiscent of pioneer settlements. No running water, of course. Outside the house cinematic high contrast white lighting illuminated the edge of a palm frond forest, a banana orchid stretching into the darkness, and goats skittered between houses

Next day we woke around 6:30am to walk to the town. The area consisted of a series of sharp mountain ridges and broad, uneven valleys, all covered in a dark green forest carpet. From the town we took a taxi for 15 minutes to get to the base of a nearby mountain and then set off. The narrow, overgrown trail – dark bushes crowding, obscuring the path – wound upward for couple of hours, passing through beautiful tropical rainforest. At one point we crossed a boggy expanse, edging along half-submerged wobbly tree trunks and, after a dozen trees, leaping to the edge of the forest marsh.

Eventually we reached the village community, which was scattered into 2-3 house clusters along the slope. Our guides, whose assistance we had requested at the mountain base village, took us to the village chief’s house. We gathered on the pseudo-porch of his long, narrow concrete hut, sitting on a smattering of plastic chairs, wooden blocks and benches. Since the villagers only spoke Twi or other local dialects, there was nothing for me to do besides sit and watch as the leader of the survey team, Daniel, spoke with the village chief and explained our project. With a small, round head, heavily-creased face and gap-toothed grin, the chief was more than happy to let us proceed.

So with assistance from some of the local farmers, we split up and walked separately from house cluster to house cluster, briefly speaking with whoever was around (typically women) to assess which, if any, households farmed coca. After completing the village inventory over the course of several hours, we reconvened and randomly selected five of the coca farmers for in-depth interviews.

The village itself, while very poor, looked reasonably healthy. Unlike places in Kenya, the fields were green and lush, and the people were not skeletal. Men were out farming (I assume), while women were with the children (interestingly, average family size seemed to be ~3-4 kids, not the 5+ I expected). Chicken, goats, lambs and even ducks running around everywhere, but no pigs. Lambs formed a chorus of high-pitched whinnies, chiming like a demented crèche. And butterflies were everywhere, flitting in and out amongst the bushes, a wild range of colors and sizes.

After observing the interview for an hour or so, Maja and I departed in order to return to Accra before it got too dark. The overcast day had turned markedly darker, and we could hear thunder in the distance as we rushed back down the mountain. Back at the base village we could get a clear sit of the horizon and see sharp line as the black clouds advanced toward us. We had returned without a clear plan for how to escape the base village, since there were no taxies and we had no phone numbers, and now the oncoming storm made the issue urgent. Asking around, we soon had the entire village gathered around us. Trying to work out a taxi phone number. Everyone knew someone who might know. But as the rain start to fall and a couple of kids set off to find a taxi by bicycle, I knew we were fucked. The patchy semi-thatched town gazebo hardly seemed sufficient for the coming storm.

Then our salvation, rusting yellow hulk, trundled around the corner. It turns out that there is a sort of minibus service running to the village, and we immediately hoped inside just as the monsoon erupted, sheeting rain against the metal. Inside only weathered patches of yellow paint remained; the rest stripped to bare metal. The dashboard was full of gaping holes, the roof leaked and the engine roared down around dirt mount roads like a mechanical beast from Sorcerer. But what was really remarkable was the water coming up at us, from where the bottom of the vehicle had rusted away.

After a while we passed through the storm and reached Kofiradou. At this point I was quite exhausted, and fortunately the rest of the journey to Accra proved unremarkable.

Departure

Dark and dusty strip of highway lit by kerosene lamps and dim yellow bulbs. Scratchy jam blaring from the only solid building in sight, a 3 story concrete slab pockmarked by balconies. Crowded onto the street, masses of people reduce the road to a long, narrow single lane stretch. Waiting for various minivan/buses (tro-tros) at unmarked yet universally recognized stops along the way, people mill in the street about and hawkers make good business.

Suddenly a tro-tro approaches and the crowd bursts into ferocious activity, pressing up against the still-moving vehicle. K-thunk and the metal door snaps open, a writhing mass pushing and shoving into the yawning cavity. And then all at once the crowd ceases; some ebb away, returning to idle waiting, and the tro-tro, satiated, departs

Bjork / Vespertine

Busy weekend, including hiking up to remote villages to interview farmers and meeting a gang leaderer (chief zaatchi) in the slum of sodom and gomorrah. To be detailed later. For now just time for a nice quote from Bjork. Probably my biggest crush at the moment.

"It sounds like a winter record. If you wake up in the middle of the night, and you go out in the garden, everything's going on out there that you wouldn't know about. That's the mood I'm trying to get. Snow owls represent that very well."

Farmer interviews

Strange peering into passing windows. Sitting under a shade tree, listening without uncomprehending answers (number of marriages, children) delivered one-by-one with his warm smile upturned at the corners. When did they meet?

Instead mutely watch as the interviewer records his nationality, age, coca production, political vote and economic conditions. Unthinking translation into a language I understand.

Afro-optimism

It’s easy to be an afro-optimist in Ghana. Although the country is still bedeviled by the minor ailments of modern Africa – insipid, incompetent bureaucrats, unimaginable red tape, and systematic petty corruption – it’s an entirely livable. Things more or less work, the power stays on 90% of the time, poverty is not nearly as extensive as India/Uganda/etc., crime is not bad/dangerous, and the klepocratic class is less brazen than in, say, Kenya or Nigeria. Democratic elections work, with no sign of military or autocratic relapse.

And there are tremendous economic opportunities here. Agriculture, for example, is comparatively backwards, but the natural tropical climate has fantastic potential. Productivity can match world-class standards, transport to Europe is cheap/fast, and the growing season is upwards of 10 months for some crops (e.g., mangos). Historically Ghana has lacked startup capital (vs. Kenya/Nigeria) for local entrepreneurship but that is changing rapidly as the countries financial system develops. Commercial-scale farmers are developing in several markets, including rice.

As a fantastic example, I was recently discussing agriculture with a local Ghaniain who works for Technoserve. He was bemoaning the lack of local seedlings for fruit orchards, which currently have to be imported from Europe at great cost. I casually said to him that he should start a business here, and his response was: “Why yes, I am doing so. Here is my business card. We have just signed a contract with a Dutch company to start a joint venture here.” Amazing!

So, things are looking good for Ghana. Let’s just hope that the recent oil discoveries don’t fuck this up.

Things I saw hawked on the way to work this morning

Street sellers flood the 4-lane road at every red light / traffic jam; impulse buy options include:
-Styrofoam blocks
-Elmer’s glue twelve packs
-Painted wood seaguls (life size)
-Etch N Sketch sets
-Umbrellas (on a sunny day)
-Walking canes
-Dead mice (on a string)
-Shell-logo blankets (bright yellow)
-Velvet blue textured tackboard
-Full, door-sized mirrors
-Of course also the more logical assortment of water, bread, fruits, chips, fried plantains and donuts.