The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Tall buildings slightly redefined

While the Burj Dubai will likely remain the tallest building in the world for a long time, the rankings of the next few buildings on the "world's tallest" list got shuffled today when the organization that ranks them changed the definition a bit:

The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top.

The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top.

This means that Trump Tower, Chicago, moved up to 6th place, and some of the other "official" heights got jiggled a bit. The new rankings as of January (when Burj Dubai opens) are:

  1. Burj Dubai, U.A.E., 818 m
  2. Taipei 101, Taiwan, 508 m
  3. Shanghai World Financial Center, China, 492 m
  4. Petronas Towers 1, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
  5. Petronas Towers 2, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
  6. Sears Willis Tower, Chicago, 442 m
  7. Trump Tower, Chicago, 423 m
  8. Jin Mao Building, Shanghai, China, 421 m
  9. Two International Financial Center, Hong Kong, 415 m
  10. CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, China, 390 m

Notice that all but two of the entrants in the list are in Asia, the exceptions being within five blocks of each other right here in Chicago. Still, it's sad to see the Hancock Center, Empire State Building, and a few others I could name, missing from the top-10 list.

Not as scary as today would have been

Reader EB has passed along Travel & Leisure's "World's Scariest Runways," including one of my favorites, Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maarten:

Why It’s Harrowing: The length of the runway—just 2,180 m—is perfectly fine for small or medium-size jets, but as the second-busiest airport in the Eastern Caribbean, it regularly welcomes so-called heavies—long-haul wide-body jetliners like Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s—from Europe, which fly in improbably low over Maho Beach and skim just over the perimeter fence.

Today I had scheduled my annual flight review (required by my flight club—the FAA requires a review only every other year), but with 28 km/h direct crosswinds gusting to 48 km/h, I used the time-honored safety procedure called "staying on the ground."

The odd lies of Sarah Palin

Andrew Sullivan has a recap of the top 30:

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

Palin lied when she claimed to be unaware of a turkey being slaughtered behind her during a filmed interview; in fact, the cameraman said she had picked the spot herself, while the slaughter was underway.

Palin lied when she denied having rejected federal stimulus money; in fact, she continued to accept and reject the funds several times.

And many, many more. This is the opposition party's de facto leader.

Not what I wanted to buy today

It's sad when a trusted companion dies. Like my poor, inoffensive laptop, which blew out its monitor at Boston Logan airport two weeks ago.

I would rather not have just ordered a new computer to replace it. I will try to get the old laptop's monitor fixed, but the time, effort, and expense involved almost don't justify it. Everything else still works just fine; in fact, I'm using it now with an external monitor. In order to get it fixed I'd need to hand it over to strangers for an unknown length of time, which means removing all the security features, encryption, and data from the thing—a process that would require a complete hard drive wipe and then take hours to restore when I get it back.

(If that seems over the top, then you don't understand computer security.)

This brings me to the conundrum I hope I've resolved appropriately. My current laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, which replaced a Latitude D610, which replaced a Latitude D600. All three share parts, spare batteries, media bay devices, power supplies, etc., meaning I have quite a collection of Latitude D600-series peripherals.

Only, Dell no longer makes 600-series laptops. The last model in the series, the D630, they discontinued a few months ago. The logical replacements are the E5400 and E6400 models, which have similar characteristics but brand-new chassis that don't support my existing 600-series parts.

At this writing Dell had five D630s left in their factory outlet store, where they sell refurbished and scratch-and-dent leftovers. They have a ton of refurbished E6400s, though, for about $50 more.

Thus, the conundrum: buy the discontinued model for which I have all those parts, or go to the new series.

What to do?

Dubai cultural disconnect

The Duke CCMBA has a novel structure that includes two courses that spread out across five of the six terms. One of these, "Cultures, Civilization, and Leadership," aims to give us the context and a set of tools to deal with the myriad cultures we encounter during the program and after. The class requires us to compose a "cultural disconnect" essay each term, which the rest of the class, rather than the professors, evaluates.

Here's mine for Dubai. (The essay refers to some diagnostic and cultural tools we've used in the course, including Cornelius Grove's cultural dimensions and the Duke Inter-Cultural Expressions (ICE) profile.)


Trading commodities underpins the financial industry in my home city, Chicago. Contracts worth billions of dollars for corn, soybeans, and hog bellies (sometimes with the hogs still attached) pass through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange every day. The CME will soon phase out its open-outcry pits, but they still exist, and traders still yell and scream to keep the buy-sell spreads as small and as reflective of market conditions as possible.

The Dubai spice souk does very much the same thing in the same way: in it, people trade commodities and fix the prices based on yelling at each other.

I should mention right now, I’m not a trader. I write software for traders, and I think they’re great people, mostly. But people become traders because they feel a rush over getting one more sixteenth of a dollar on a put option. I’m happy to help, but I’m the last person anyone would want in a trading pit. Here’s why.

The day before our culture dash, I took the Dubai Metro across the Creek and walked through Deira to explore. My Lonely Planet guide not only told me where to find the spice and gold souks, but also gave me some information on something called “bargaining.” Because I’ve seen the CME I could understand the theory behind this phenomenon. Apparently, like at CME, people exchange things of value for money after yelling at each other. The scale is smaller and slower (grams instead of tonnes, dirhams instead of millions of dollars, hours instead of milliseconds), but the idea, I had read, was the same.

I poked around the spice souk for a few minutes, dodging the fake Rolex hawkers, and found a shop run by Ali and Malik. They both welcomed me in and immediately started pointing out the spices for sale: curry powder, rose petals, cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, all right there in small bins. To emphasize the quality of the merchandise Ali physically maneuvered me from one bin to another and merrily explained what each spice was and what it was for. I nodded a lot and demonstrated my deep spice knowledge by saying things like “saffron” when he pointed at the cloves, for example. Malik, meanwhile, wandered in an out of the store, chuckling to himself.

I asked for about 50g each of four spices. Ali scooped them into bags and weighed them, informing me eventually that each bag had somehow become 60g (no cultural disconnect there—they “accidentally” add about 10% to every weighed item at the local Whole Foods, too). Then we stared at each other.

Ali, no dummy, realized that I completely missed the point about bargaining: the parties actually have to come up with a price before they can consummate the sale, which requires that someone make an offer. Ali also understood that “strategic silence” (something else I’ve read about in books on negotiating) might result in me blurting out a number so high that he would feel bad (but not that bad) taking it from me.

Finally he gave up and blurted out, “OK.” Then he consulted a dog-eared booklet, typed in some numbers, got out a calculator, and showed me what it said. After a little mental arithmetic I realized two things: (a) the price quoted for the spices in the bag were easily one-half what they would cost in Chicago; and (b) Ali would never sell these spices at that price to anyone who knew the first thing about bargaining.

This year’s Lonely Planet: Dubai promised that the real price for something will be 20% to 50% less than the opening offer. It also said that some people hate bargaining. Somewhere between these two facts, I offered 20% below the quoted price, and after several minutes managed to get a 10% discount on Ali’s opener. (In my defense this represented both producer surplus and consumer surplus, which means everyone got something he wanted out of the transaction.)

So what happened? My ICE profile shows I’m a typical Midwest-raised American. I have a Direct communication style in Ambiguity in Communication, and I’m Reserved in almost every indicator of space context. In other words, I prefer quiet, to-the-point discussions (not that I haven’t had less-than-quiet arguments every now and again), with less touching and more physical distance than even many other Americans. In the souk I faced an experienced bargainer with considerably more information about the transaction than I had, moving closer, and raising his voice.

Another factor: when viewed through Grove’s Cultural Dimensions, in this transaction Ali and I came from opposite ends of the Uncertainty Avoidance continuum. To Ali, not knowing the final price was expected; to me, it was disconcerting. Grove maps low Uncertainty Avoidance to informal interactions, lackadaisical recordkeeping, and informal norms; higher Uncertainty Avoidance shows formality in interactions, a desire for ordered data, formal procedures, and calculated risks.

As a reserved Midwesterner, I don’t usually interact with anyone while shopping until I’m ready to buy something. Then, I expect to pay the offered price (except for cars and real property, two important exceptions). If a merchant offers an item for sale at a price I think too high, I simply don’t buy it from her, without comment. A shop that offered items at 20% to 50% over the market-clearing price would soon go out of business in Chicago, as locals would think the place was a rip-off.

In Ali’s world, who can say what the price will be? He does know, to some extent, what his boss paid for the spices, and he knows he should sell them for more than that, but so what? A tourist might walk in any time and pay 50% over cost for a tiny bag of curry powder.

This style of trading is a vestige of the region’s long history of nomadic, barter-based society. In the desert, traders...well, traded, not for abstractions like money but for real things that they needed. They lived in an uncertain, hostile environment. A thing’s value could change from day to day, as conditions shifted or as they acquired other items through trade. Spices, in particular, had huge gyrations in value as they came through the region in large quantities but at irregular intervals. To imagine that you could trade a measure of cloves for an unvarying, arbitrary amount of bronze from one day to the next would be considered foolish; to imagine you could exchange it for paper would be considered insane.

In the end, I came to a rapprochement with Ali, when my entire team invaded his store the next day on the Culture Dash. I may have paid too much the day before, but for the extra business I brought him, and for taking a bag of pistachios for 80% of his first offered price (“for you, 20% off!” How could I refuse?), he gave us some cinnamon at the best price he could offer: free.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends

Another day, another trip to Heathrow. I picked the late-afternoon flight back to O'Hare instead of the mid-afternoon flight, because I thought I could sleep in to speed along my re-adjustment to Chicago time. No such luck. So off I go, having woken up at 6:30 GMT, looking forward to driving home from O'Hare at 2:00 GMT tomorrow morning.

There has to be an easier way...

Second-favourite city in the world

Actually, London ties for second with New York and San Francisco. Here follow some reasons. First, Golden Square in the West End:

Jermyn Street, where I would buy all my clothes if I made, oh, £10,000 a month:

London also has history embedded in strange places. Take this block of apartment buildings on Courtfield Gardens, South Kensington, about two blocks from my hotel:

An old friend lived in the near building for a couple of years. She explained that the building at the end of the row—her building—replaced one that the Germans bombed in 1940 or 1941.

By the way, here's a really good reason not to live in London, or at least not to own a car here:

To spare you the math, at today's exchange that works out to $7 per gallon.