Learning: It's what's for dinner

This week I learned that the internet is far from carbon neutral. The energy necessary to maintain ever growing servers might as well be the mountain top removal of the future, another problem that could go largely unnoticed and unchecked for decades. Ugh.

I'm still on this big entrepreneurship kick and I wonder if someone can create a creative business to alleviate the issue. I've started to think of social entrepreneurship as the answer to all social problems, especially in this time of high-unemployment. For example, what if, instead of fighting with coal companies in West Virginia about the value of environment vs. jobs, we just gave local communities the tools they need to create their own companies and economies? Surely there must be some alternative to the coal economy.

Seeing people speak at Harvard has been neat, although I do it so often now I didn't go to the Obama rally today because I didn't feel like seeing another person talk at me. But - back to the positive - I am learning a lot of new things.


At a recent talk called "Understanding the Yemeni State," I learned that part of the reason the U.S. and Yemen butt heads is that Yemen is unwilling to give up its unusual security arrangement. The official army is only about 60,000 troops and the government relies heavily on tribal reserve units for big conflicts and to keep tabs on the country's hard-to-patrol areas. Additionally, poetry is a huge part of the political process in Yemen and there is a long tradition of using words rather than coercive force to influence actors. Throughout Yemen's history, leaders who were not especially eloquent would hire poets to help push new policies forward.

Thursday, I went to a seminar about the floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the most devastating natural disasters of this decade. Even though not that many people died, the flood wiped out much of the livestock in the poorest region of the country, where people typically don't have titles to their land and assets are held in livestock. It's been estimated that it will take $30 billion to replace what's been destroyed. Only a few billion has been pledged by the international community so far so basically, the situation is really bad.

Rescue efforts in Pakistan have been hindered by poor record keeping and a lack of access to real time data. A lot of villages affected by flooding just simply aren't on the map and neither are the nearest hospitals. Luckily, there is a small group of civilian computer engineers working on the problem. More about that here.

Much of the discussion at the seminar addressed challenges to emergency preparedness and response. Harvard Kennedy School's Dutch Leonard discussed issues with the current trend in actions by the international community: underinvestment in prevention, overinvestment in recovery and the tendency of Western countries to abandon people mid-recovery. I was shocked to hear him say that, while the earthquake in Haiti happened almost a year ago, not a single US dollar has made it to Haiti yet. What!?! Apparently, if we help countries decentralize both emergency preparedness and response efforts, we can expect better results in the future. Bangladesh has done a good job in this category as a poor country that has managed to address natural disaster preparedness, in their case for cyclones. So, that was all kind of neat to learn.

Wednesday, we had our second ever Article Club meeting, co-hosted by Wyatt and Kaz. The article was about friendship and we ended up talking a lot about how Facebook impacts friendship and how strong friendships, or lack there of, influence the divorce rate in America. I enjoyed our discussion, but I'm hoping the next article has nothing to do with the internet. I still like to think it does not completely rule my life. We had around 15 people in attendance, lots of chili and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Drew, an Article Club member and recent Portland, OR transplant, has a great little blog of daily poems that incorporate the top Google hits of the day.

GOOD magazine has an interesting blog post about the word "like", and how it is not an "Americanism inflicted on us by the Valley Girls of the eighties" but rather an older habit used by English-speakers all over the world. Les Janka, an avid anti-"like" advocate, will be disappointed to hear that.

It's starting to get chilly again in Boston and already I am fearing the worst. I'm remembering what it's like to feel the draft blow through my living room as I, wrapped in all the clothes I own, hold my nose to keep it warm while trying to read a book. I thanked God every time I walked outside this week and discovered that, although my house was freezing, I did not in fact need to be wearing long underwear. Cory Branan recently tweeted that he was starting a petition to move New York to the South. Can I do the same thing with Boston? I think Boston in North Carolina would be ideal.

If anyone has any tips for baiting mouse traps, please hook a sista up. More than a year into our epic battle against the rodents, they've gotten too smart for us and stopped going in the traps. I recently resorted to buying poison but they appear to be too smart for that too. Little bastards.