“We are asleep with compasses in our hands.”
W. S. Merwin, American poet, born September 30, 1927
Vanished Civilizations
There’s still time to sign up for Jim Mumm’s Elevating Your Sales Technique workshop tonight in Northampton. Jim is a successful entrepreneur and an excellent speaker. His company Executive Training Solutions, LLC provides Sandler Training in the Pioneer Valley. 6:00–8:00PM. Refreshments provided.
A Millenial reported watching Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” in his Psychology Class. We didn’t find out what he thought about it: he’s sixteen, and will not communicate with adults about that stuff. His grandmother, a Baby Boomer, thought it would be fun to show the Millenial and his Gen X father a short, satirical film called “De Düva” (The Dove, 1968). It’s a very funny pastiche of Bergman: faux-Swedish dialogue (Madeleine Kahn, in her film debut, offers a cigar to her cousin: “Phalliken symbolsk?”), a game of badminton with Death (homage to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”), and a mixture of nostalgia, natural beauty, and existential dread. “The Dove” was once very popular at college film societies and art houses (an art house is a movie theater specializing in showing serious independent and foreign films, and revivals. They still exist, I think).
I spent a couple of hours working in the Haydenville Library in Florence yesterday. It’s a charming little library. The people who lived in this area obviously valued literacy highly enough at one time to build branch libraries all over the place. Like our own Shelburne Public Library, for instance; not the rather grand Arms Library in Shelburne Falls, but the sweet little stone building erected in the 1890s in Shelburne Center, in a place that has never had a store as far as I know. It has two rooms and a couple of thousand books. It’s open from 3:00 to 7:00PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 10:00–12:00 on Saturday morning. That’s where I go to pick up and return the books that I order via the C/W MARS online library system, which gives me access to the holdings of every public library in the Commonwealth, and some academic ones as well.
Reading the superb second volume of Vaclav Smil’s masterful account of the invention and development of the key technologies of the 20th century. 
Very interesting post from a blogger who works as an investor in Hong Kong. Premise is that the quantity of steel, aluminum, and so on he consumes has declined radically in his lifetime and that the trend continues. What does this mean for extraction industries, utilities, and especially for emerging markets, which are all about making “stuff.” Add population decline in the next few decades, and the rise of nanotechnology with its promise of cheap, scalable hardware manufacture, and the future looks decidedly bleak for credit investors. There will be less need for bank lending and more opportunities for venture capital and the funding of research. Being reincarnated as the Bond Market might not as great an idea as it was 1994 (“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everyone.”—James Carville, Clinton campaign strategist)
“…If I did an inventory of how much steel, aluminium and the like I consume it has likely gone down a great deal and is comically less than what my parents consumed. Sure I spend a fair bit on services – publication subscriptions, Evernote, gym membership, Fitbit, going out to eat, etc – but the central fact of my existence is that the material content has gone down markedly all the while my quality of life has improved markedly. It has also become increasingly similar to that of everyone else as Rick Bookstaber has observed.
“Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.”
Occurs to me that in a world where we are always connected that the only good thing about our current, execrable air travel system, that it gets you there fast, will be less important in the future. The top speed of the alumimum airships being developed by the Aeros Corporation is about 140mph, which would get you from New York to Los Angeles in about 20 hours. If you could travel in comfort and be connected the whole time, why wouldn’t you want to? Compare to the cramped, inhuman conditions endured by jet passengers. Oh, wait, things are better in First Class, aren’t they?
The Last Word