nVerse

BART Logo Designer Influenced By Star Trek? or Vice Versa?

Original BART (bay area rapid transit) Logo as it appeared in 1958

aaand the star trek insignia:

see the similarity?

So, seeing how Star Trek debuted in 1966….perhaps the creators of star trek (er, at least the designers) were big BART fans?

perhaps, perhaps….you never know

live long, and prosper

Random Solar Thought

You know how you can get a sunburn/tan on an overcast day (especially if you are surfing or skiing)?  Well, by that same mechanism, solar panels still work on rainy days…but by how much?  And though San Franciscans are very eco and granola, not many of the homes have solar panels on their roofs…is it because they wont work as well under our oft cloudy and rainy skies?  duh. yes.

Various efficiency impacts on solar panels occur under different conditions:

Cloudy & raining - 25% drop in efficiency

Heavy San Francisco fog - 15%-20% drop in efficiency

Light San Francisco fog - 8%-15% drop in efficiency

[source: residential solar]

Protest Mimes

There’s a protest going down at the Meridien Hotel in the financial district.  And these mimes in attendance make total sense.

No, I would not like a donut - thanks, creepy protest mime!

AC Transit Bus Throwdown - Bus Fight!!!

Apparently, riding public transit in the Bay Area is perhaps the most dangerous way to spend your time.  I’m referring to the string of totally random stabbings on the muni light rail last year, and the various fights caught on videophones over the past 12 months (hooray for consumer accessible technology!) like the infamous bart-cop shooting incident and the crazy chinatown bus ride fight.  This one, the latest to become a youtube populario, is post-worthy - primarily for two reasons:

1) a dude in his 70s unleashes with a vicious beat down

2) towards the end, the camerawoman nicely frames blood on the seat - poetic! nice composition! way to capture the moment! Brava!

No More Big Macs in Iceland

The multitudes of readers of this blog will recall from my prior ramblings about McDonalds that McDs is an economic index of sorts - a bell-weather of global financial bust and booms.  Yesterday, the Golden Arches announced that they are shuttering all of their Icelandic restaurants with no plans to ever come back.  Yikes!  Now, recall that prior to the collapse of their banking sector last year, Iceland was one of the wealthiest nations per capita.  Reykjavik was an international financial hub providing support for all sorts of European assets…now their economy is at crisis levels.  And McDs is saying that the global economy that the Icelandic business model relies on is too precarious to ever come back to, even after people start spending more Kronas on Big Macs. 

See, the closings aren’t just about shifts in the demand curves - not just about people jonesing for that oh-so sweet-and-fatty taste of the McChicken Sandwich.  It’s also about the challenges of operating within the Icelandic economic profile - an economy that relies heavily on the Global Economy. Mainly, the sensitivity to import costs.  Most ‘ingredients’ come in from Germany; hence, die bestandteile prices have nearly doubled their costs due to the recent currency shifts (Krona way down, Euro up).  This cost function shift pushes the prices of menu items far above what consumers would pay in a sensible economy, let alone in a down economy.

Ok, ok, so what’s the punchline?  McDonalds is showing us that the underpinnings of harnessing your nation (esp if you are a small island of 300,000 people in the middle of the Atlantic) to the Global Economy spigot is not quite mature enough a system to bet the farm on…especially when currency rates are variables in your operating cost function…no insulation from the effects of macro-economic shocks to the global markets.