Broek op Langedijk – the first sail-through auction house

by Surya

“We go boating
Go for tea,
We sail to the portage
Drink sweet milk with cream”
– Dutch nursery rhyme

Portage, also called a carry, is a place where boats are carried over the dike from one canal into another. Something, which is quite hard to imagine, till you actually see it.

Broek op Langedijk, literally means the bridge on the long dike. The village, about 50 kms north of Amsterdam, consists of houses built on the dike that was built to protect the land from the vagaries of the North Sea. The region around this is called the “Realm of the Thousand Islands”. In actual fact, the number of islands dotting this area is close to 15,000.

Around the year 1000 AD, the North Holland of today was mainly a peat area dotted with peat rivers. Houses were built on the banks and the surrounding sands were used for agriculture. However, during the 11th century there were several dry summers, which rendered the land unsuitable for agriculture. In the ingenious Dutch way, ditches were dug around the land, resulting in a lot of water ways surrounding numerous islands. The small islands were used for cultivating vegetables and fruits. The proximity to water kept the plots relatively warm even during the cold Dutch winters. The size of the island was determined by what one man could cultivate by hand. The reclamation continued for centuries and ultimately, the “realm of thousand islands” was born.

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Unaccustomed Earth

by Surya

Just finished the title story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book Unaccustomed Earth. It is an amazing read – I was feeling a tad guilty that I bought the hardcover, but now I am glad I did not wait for the paperback. Looking forward to reading the rest.

Home manager – outsourced?

by Surya

Brazen Careerist, one of my regular reads, has a great article pointing out that house managers are a necessity for women with high flying careers. Just the term house manager is so cool! If only I could find an outsourced home manager who could do all my chores, but from far ( I hate the …

Church to bookshop

by Surya

What do you do with all the grand churches in Europe as the number of religiously inclined people are dwindling? In Maastricht, 13th-century Dominican church has been converted into a bookshop! “Happily, books and churches have always gone together: in the beginning, as St John tells us, was the Word; the word was, in time, …

Outsource the 3:00 am call…

by Surya

This is hilarious: “Sure,” I say, “J… can do Australian, American, French and English accents. Sometimes all in the same sentence. Imagine how close the other world leaders will feel to you. Birds of a feather and all that.”

Review: The Logic of Life

by Surya

There is just something about the team “popular Economics” that is so paradoxical that I am usually tempted to stay away from any book that even slightly falls into this genre. But the rave reviews that Tim Harford’s Logic of Life had been receiving, combined with the fact that I have, on more than one occasion, enjoyed his FT columns, decided to give the book a try. I am far from disappointed – in fact, I confess that I am ready to replace my unreasonable distrust of the genre with a new found enthusiasm to read some of the titles referred to in this book, some of which may be heralded as icons of the genre. I promise you, true to my usual self, I will make a list of these books before I go about buying and / or reading them. But before that, let’s spare some thought for the book that affected this change of heart.

The fundamental concept in the book, unsurprisingly, is that human beings are rational – everything we do, however illogical it might seem – is founded in cold hard reason, if only you look hard enough. By the end of the first chapter, Harford has you pretty much convinced of this and you will be ready to believe that, from hookers to teenagers to criminals, everyone is endowed with a rational mind. The one caveat to this thesis that Harford himself admits to is that rationality is accentuated by experience. The way I see it, this is similar to conditional learning – the more times you have done something, the more likely you are to know the likely effects of a wide range of your actions and you will pick the one most likely to lead to positive gains for you – either now or in the future. Whether you call it good old common sense or logic, the end result remains the same, and can be explained rationally.

The beauty of the book lies in the wide range of examples that Harford has chosen to explain the logic of. Unlike many of the best sellers of the past years, which left you with the distinct feeling that one idea or concept, best suited for a long article, had been pulled and stretched in all possible directions to fill enough pages to call it a book – Harford introduces refreshingly new analyses chapter after chapter. His wand of rationality illumines the logic behind seemingly instinctive moves of seasoned poker players, emotion-laden decisions behind marriage and divorce and even tries to explain why your boss will always be overpaid and why your job sucks – obviously not a great ad for careers at FT considering that he does not even entertain the thought that some of us might like our jobs, but powerful analyses nevertheless.[…]

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Noam Chomsky on Terrorism

by Surya

Noam Chomsky eloquently discusses “The Most Wanted List”: “.. they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are …

Technology and creativity

by Surya

When you start writing an article, what is the first thing you do?

Several years before, the first thing I would have done would have been to settle down in a nice comfortable chair with a blank sheet of paper, a good pen and armed, probably, with a nice cup of coffee. I would then jot down my train of thought, along with the main points of argument and counterargument. I would glance into space every now and then, and think. Then I would arm myself with a list of topics I would want to research deeper and then head to the local library to hopefully get a few books on the topic. At least this is how I remember preparing for my high school essays.

But now, just as I was considering writing my blog post, the first thing I did was Google the words “creativity and modern technology”. With not many hits on what I wanted to write, I tried permutations of the topic and spent a good ten minutes figuring out what has been written on the topic by those before me. Admittedly, a blog post does not have the same bearing on my life as a bad grade in a school essay would have had nor do I have the luxury of time to spend as much time on one post – but somehow, I would like to believe that all those years of school education had some impact on the way I think and write.

Technology has affected the way we create content. I remember the first time I wrote an html page, I had bought a tome of a book on HTML and familiarized myself with most of the commands before writing <html> on a blank txt file. Yet, now if I were to write a Wordpress template, even though I don’t know CSS and I barely remember HTML, I wouldn’t consider reading up. I would start with an old template and work by trial and error, till I am happy with what I see.

So what has been the impact of modern technology on the way we create content? Have the changes been for better or for worse? And how can we maximize what is good about the new change while keeping the less desirable aspects to a minimum? […]

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