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The latest round of hand-wringing about the stability of the US dollar as a global reserve currency, this time by the Chinese, makes me wonder why they don’t get it yet. There can be no stable store of value, ever. Why? Because all forms of money are inherently debts that others take on. What is money? Tokens that you can offer to others at a later date in exchange for their goods or their services. Why would they give you their goods or services in exchange for mere tokens? Either because they need those tokens to repay debts, or because they in turn hope someone else will need them enough to accept them in exchange for stuff you want to get. So when you save money, you’re effectively making a loan to society by delivering value (e.g. working) in exchange for paper, a loan you can call in later by trading in your paper for stuff you want.

The most common alternative to this type of “loan” is to store your value in something physical - either commodities (gold is a favorite) or real estate. Instead of making a loan to society, you’re trading your labor for something physical that you can later barter for other valuables, and in the case of real estate you get to enjoy having it in the meantime. As a method of savings this has two problems - the value of your storage medium can fluctuate wildly due to supply and demand, and at a macro level it doesn’t scale well, which is why countries have been slowly ditching their gold reserves.

Back to cash then.. so what China has been doing for the past few decades is busily manufacturing goods for Americans in exchange for a big IOU in the form of US dollars. The only way those dollars will be worth anything to the Chinese is if someday they want something back from the Americans, for which they can offer them these dollars. Problem is, they’re starting to wonder whether there will ever be enough stuff they want from the Americans to make good on the massive IOU they’ve accumulated. Bigger problem is, if there isn’t, then that IOU isn’t worth much unless somebody else wants it, but nobody really does, so they’re stuck with it.

A meeting with a potential harpist for our wedding left us dissatisfied - just about the only way to have a harpist at a wedding not be cheesy is to have a heavy dose of irony somewhere in the playlist. In our email to him we had asked if he could do any Led Zeppelin, a request he politely ignored when he played for us. He did mention he’s always wanted to try playing Radiohead on the harp, which got us thinking…

The next day a bit of creative googling revealed that someone has indeed covered Radiohead on the harp, along with Prodigy and Metallica.. the last of which led to some more googling until we struck gold - an all-Metallica dual-harp cover band. They’re brilliant. Now if only we could convince them to come to NY to play for us…

With all the hype around social networking and various other Web 2.x phenomena, sometimes I’m reminded that one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet is still the hyperlink. The way it allows you to free-associate your way across the ideascape so often leads me to new places I would have never, ever found in “meatspace”.. so today I was reading the NYT Magazine feature on an artist building his career in Second Life, and a few clicks later I ended up watching this video…

The music in the video is just an evolving electronic synth loop like something from Steve Reich or Brian Eno, but it’s the animation of the evolution that’s whimsical and funny on the surface and weirdly conceptual once you watch it for a while. Even though I know there aren’t real ants inside my computer rearranging the notes as the music plays, and I even understand a bit about the physics of what’s really going on in the computer’s processor, in the end the ants aren’t a bad metaphor for understanding how it all works.

The rental car Avis gave me this time was a Nissan hybrid, which I’ve driven before, but this was the first I’ve had with a wireless key. I’ve used plenty of cars with electronic keys before, but you always had to stick it in some socket before pushing the start button.. With this one all you need to do is have it in your pocket and the car will start.

This seemingly minor enhancement makes a surprisingly big difference in the experience of driving the car. You don’t have to initiate the interaction with the car - as soon as you approach, it knows you’re legit and comes to life. You just walk up, get in and drive off. It’s a great example of a technology advance that makes life simpler rather than more complicated.. After only 2 days of this, the thought of sticking a key in and turning it to start a car already feels completely archaic.

The release of Kindle for iPhone today came just in time for me to take it for a spin on a cross-country flight. While waiting to board, I downloaded the app, and browsed around amazon.com (via a web browser) for some suitable airplane reading - not too heavy, not too light, enough to last me 4-5 hours.

I settled on “Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi, which looked like a nice semi-thoughtful pulp sci-fi novel in the old Heinlein mould. The reader app itself works nicely.. The font is almost condescendingly large but flipping pages is fast enough that I didn’t mind.

But as I got into the book I started to get a weird sense of déjà vu.. Some of the concepts and scenarios felt really familiar, making me wonder - am I getting so senile that I could re-read a whole book without remembering having read it before? Maybe I read a sequel? But still, this book came out in 2005, if I’d read anything by this author it wouldn’t have been that long ago.

This led me to remember the times I did consciously re-read a book in the past few years.. Even then, my recall of details was sometimes dim and at times I felt a sense of rediscovery.. And what’s notable is that this never happens to me with any other medium - old TV shows, movies, videogames, even blog posts, if I come across one I’ve seen before I recognize it instantly. Maybe it’s something about novels? Too much detail to remember, or that they’re more about textures and feelings and leave a more vague impression on the memory.

Or maybe some parallel me in a different universe just read the same book last week…

Finding myself in Boston yesterday with a couple of hours to spare and a 4-hour train ride coming up, I visited what has to be one of my favorite bookstores on the planet. After an hour of feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of interesting books written on important but obscure topics, I picked up a collection of essays by an impressive-sounding architecture professor I had never heard of.

The essays themselves are pretty good - nice and short and well written. They cover a variety of topics from the separation of communication from form in design (i.e. signage) to the democratization of surveillance caused by phonecams and youtube. There’s one particular paragraph in the preface that caught my eye:

Designing is always a matter of simultaneously crafting the required functionality and the intended messages, subject to physical and economic constraints.

One thing about architectural writing that has often amazed and occasionally frustrated me is how disconnected it can be from their actual craft of designing buildings. They’ll talk about philosophy, cultural trends, social dynamics, anything but the actual fact that they’re creating skyscrapers and houses. The cynic in me sometimes feels like they’re trying to glorify what could otherwise be a mundane profession - and the public largely buys it, judging by the whole starchitect phenomenon.

On my calmer days I think it’s simply an extreme example of what’s happening everywhere in the developed world. It has become so easy to fulfill our basic functional needs - in this case to provide shelter against the elements - that we spend the vast majority of our efforts on the emotional context of the physical object. We still think about whether a piece of clothing is warm enough or comfortable, but that’s long since stopped being the main reason we buy it. Maybe architects are just more conscious of that than anyone else?