On last night’s State Dinner for Hu Jintao: “My wife was seated next to a very famous musician, who hopped up to shoot a smart-phone video when, just behind us, Barack Obama and Hu Jintao (plus interpreters) stopped to chat with Jackie Chan.”
Sorry to everyone else. This is pretty bad. Via xkcd:
Via Ezra Klein: Life imitates art. More specifically, it imitates “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: For context, one of my favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide: The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers
Over the past few weeks, I found what I would consider to be the perfect hang-out bar: The Zeppelin Café in Phnom Penh. I heard about it from my guide book, which says this: “Who says vinyl is dead? It lives on here in Phnom Penh, thanks to the owner of this old-skool rock bar, who mans the turntables every night. Fun.” It did sound fun. But I decided to do a little more research before heading over. Lonely Planet ranks it #115 of #117 things to do in Phnom Penh and #558 of #579 things in do in Cambodia. Ouch. Of all the potential things to do in the entire country of Cambodia, apparently only 21 of them are worse
Admittedly, we went vegetarian that particular night.
I was surprised to find that in Cambodia, beer is often served in a glass of ice. This seems to be a bit ridiculous to me, as the cans and bottles are often cold to begin with — why dilute perfectly good beer? I’ve heard many explanations. Local Cambodian’s certainly like to drink, and one person told me that drinking beer with ice helps make sure you don’t get too drunk too fast (it’s not true). And then I read that establishments like to show off the fact that they have a plentiful supply of fresh ice. Regardless, it’s a strange tradition. One I probably won’t be taking home. Also, as a follow-up to my previous post on Angkor Beer,
I thought I was done talking about eating bugs, but then my mom pointed me to this article highlighting the environmental and nutritional benefits for developing countries: “Insects offer many advantages as a sustainable source of protein. The cold-blooded creatures require less feed to produce proteins. For example, a cricket can produce the protein equivalent of cows with six times less feed. Moreover, insects are already considered delicacies in many cultures, and the practice of eating insects goes back millenia. The Eewww-factor is a learned behavior reflecting our recent sensibilities about hygiene and health (quite ignoring the fact that we are all eating bugs already in foods meeting prescribed contamination limits). But insects which are properly raised, harvested and prepared present
Everybody should probably see this once:
I’ve always found bargaining to be interesting from both a behavioral economics and a cultural perspective. Chris Blattman had a great post on bargaining fractions a couple years back, specifically focusing on taxi fares. To summarize, in many countries there’s no taxi meter, and it’s appropriate (and often necessary) to negotiate a rate. Chris has found that the final negotiated price in a given country is usually a pretty consistent fraction of the driver’s initial offer price (assuming you’re a decent negotiator). But what’s interesting is that this fraction varies significantly between countries. Chris then talks about a few negotiation strategies that will help a traveler get down to a given country’s fraction without paying too much of a “foreigner
I received quite a few questions and reactions in response to my fried tarantula posting. To address some of them: Yes I really ate it, no it wasn’t that gross, it was in fact fried and not cooked with an aerosol can and lighter, it cost me about three cents, and the legs tasted like a combination of sweet and sour chicken (it must have been marinated in something) and soft shell crab. It’s actually a very common snack in certain parts of Cambodia. When you sit down in restaurants, people come around before you order with a stack of them in a bowl. As I observed this, at least half the tables in the restaurant purchased a few. I