Slingshot

Thalys Paris-Bruxelles

If you’ve ever needed to book a plane or a train at the last minute, you’ll know how expensive that can be.

In the complex and profit-enhancing universe of yield management, travel companies make pricing decisions in a way that allows them to extract the most value from each customer based on their personal characteristics.

This is known as discriminatory pricing, and despite the obnoxious-sounding name, it’s perfectly legal, and economically helps everyone.  It means that the people who are willing to pay the most are the people who pay the most, and those who want to pay less are able to pay less, and are used to fill up the empty space to ensure that the operators of the train run as close to full capacity as possible.

The way the train, plane and other companies do this is by setting up a payment structure based on certain rules that allow people to self-select into the category of price that they want, without ever being aware of it.  Once you know how this works, and with a little effort, forward planning and creative economic behaviour, you can easily access the best deals.

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The Cape from Table Mountain

I feel unjustifiably ungrateful.

I’m so lucky to live in Paris with its rich cultural, artistic and architectural heritage, but returning from Cape Town, the most obvious features are the disagreeable interactions with the natives and a confrontational undertone to many situations. It’s strangely miserable here. What’s going on?

Perhaps it’s the climate, or maybe something to do with the city itself, but in Cape Town I felt as though people were genuinely happy to be there. When someone would serve me a drink in a restaurant, drive me somewhere in their taxi, give me directions in the street or say goodbye after I’d paid at the counter in a shop, they’d always leave me with a positive impression. The same cannot, regrettably, be said of most of my recent experiences in Paris. Read the rest of this entry »

An indirect route...

How big is Africa? Big enough that if you have to fly from Europe to the southern tip of the African continent, you’d rather do it in a straight line.

No such luck for me. I’m going in a few days via Dubai, and since I’m doing it on my own dime, and the seats are already overbooked due to the Indaba  mining congress happening in Cape Town, I’m going in economy. Hurray for me, 16 hours in the air and 22 hours total travel time in a space that would be considered inhumane for the transport of, say, a goat.

I was looking at the map generated on the left from Google Maps, and it struck me that Mali looked like it was about the size of France. I’ve lived in Mali, and it’s more than double the size of France, so I was a little curious.  I also remembered a fantastic graphic that illustrates the true size of the African Continent in all its glory, which I now share with you. Read the rest of this entry »

Trees in the mid-winter

Once a year, a group of old school friends get together for a weekend of skiing in Austria, at the invitation of one of us who takes it upon himself to organise this very entertaining trip every year.

Apart from the benefit of seeing old friends, enjoying good food and conversation, and having the opportunity to do some sport, I’ve always found that going either to the ocean or to the mountains satisfies some deeply-seated need in the human psyche.  After two days of skiing in the freezing cold, with 360-degree views of the mountains and a blue sky from horizon to horizon, you feel refreshed in some hard-to-define way that goes beyond the mere fact that it’s ten Celsius below and your equipment isn’t up to the challenge.

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Is this where you want to be?

The train stops in the tunnel on the way to work, chipping away another moment of your life that is lost forever. Five minutes later, an announcement telling you there’s a problem crackles over the speakers. Several people sigh as though that was disappointing. As though they hadn’t figured out that there was a problem all on their own. The smell of your fellow passengers is almost stronger than the stale smell of overused train carriage. It’s hot, even though it’s winter, and a single trickle of sweat can be felt, making its way down your spine. In a moment, your shirt will begin to stick to your chest. The girl on the other side of the carriage looks like she might be about to throw up. Sadly, all this brings to mind is the length of the subsequent delay as the system grinds to a halt because of a sick passenger. You turn up the volume on your MP3 player. Anything to pretend you’re somewhere else.

Is this where you want to be? Read the rest of this entry »

A lion in the Forbidden City

It’s freezing cold in the Hall of Heavenly Purity. How the emperors managed to maintain their dignity in the middle of winter in these huge open spaces I have no idea.

After wandering around the Imperial Palace in Beijing for a couple of hours (and I’ve barely seen half of it), I’m finding that the spectacular visual feast is more than just a photo opportunity – it’s good food for introspection.

Standing in a place like this breaks the illusion that we are the lead character in our own little drama.  We’re small actors in a cast of billions, and those of us who manage to get enough distance from our own little existence will be the only ones to really understand the story of our times.  It’s hard to see the whole stage when you’re constantly under the illusion that you’re at the center of it.

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No more alcohol

I don’t like New Years resolutions, but I am subject to the December excesses.  As a consequence, I am ringing in the New Year with a month during which I abstain – more or less – from alcohol and caffeine. It’s quite likely that my twisted mind decides on this course of action in December so as to jettison guilt as I contemplate the third massive meal in as many days, and the several that are to come between the middle of the month and the beginning of January. Having done this several times, I highly recommend it. A month is a perfectly achievable target for giving up alcohol, and although I am not fanatical about the health benefits of going teetotal, but there is a difference between not drinking between two weekends, and not drinking for 30 days.  You feel it when you fall asleep and when you get up in the morning, and it’s a good feeling to rediscover if you, like me, are a non-abusing but nevertheless frequent drinker.

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Stockholm airport dealing with the snow (from the BBC)

Travel chaos has struck Europe, as we suffer through yet another year of inane commentary from a press who seem to think that everything should “just work”, have an annoying tendency to use the phrase “how hard can it be?”, and too often point towards the northernmost countries in our part of the world and argue, “if they can do it, why can’t we?”.

The BBC’s done its best to answer this question in a politically sensitive way, with a case study on Helsinki airport, where the temperatures are much colder than they are here.

The unvarnished truth is both hard to accept and unpalatable.  On the one hand, we choose not to deal with bad weather, because it’s simply too costly.  On the other, the conditions when it freezes around northern European airports are worse than you’d think at this time of year, because the temperature is just around the freezing point, which causes not just snow, but lots of ice. Read the rest of this entry »

How Facebook sees the world (Source: Facebook, Dec 2010)

A Facebook intern recently used the information from the website to draw a map of relationships across the world.  When plotting all the friendships by their geographical location, a map of the world shows up that, apart from being just plain nice to look at, has some interesting geopolitical characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »

This image was taken at 6.30am when we were on our way to swim with the dolphins.  It shows the fishing boats grounded by the low tide, with the morning sunlight coming from our left.

The picture was taken on 1st December 2010.