Tour guiding Nostalgia

I wrote this entry some time ago after reading this article in the MIT magazine.

But was inspired to post it after seeing this rather vapid article on the NY Times most e-mailed list.

We were told not to walk backward way back in 1997. Though I did anyway, since that was the only way I was able to get through my 75 minute spiel.

I swear that tour guiding was responsible for getting me to feel comfortable talking in front of a large audience at length (sometimes over 100 people). Before then, in high school, I came in close to last in the 5 minute speech event required for the Academic Decathalon. The thought of having stuff to say for more than 5 minutes was incomprehensible. Of course, now I regularly do 6 hours of lecture in a single day, it's funny, how life works.

I became a tour guide, inspired by my guide when I first visited MIT as a high school student in 1995, and tried every time to give a tour that went beyond a recitation of the same platitudes about class sizes and TA's that made all the other schools sound the same.

I worked extra hard because I knew that who your tour guide is has a disproportionate effect on which college you choose (the weather on the day you visited also does). I was told by one parent after a tour that they were impressed because tour guides at most colleges are normally pretty girls, and given I was neither, I started with two strikes against me.

I also always tried to dispel the myths people normally have about MIT. Telling people about how we have the most varsity sports in the country (which unfortunately ended this year), with the best civilian pistol team in the country (I always joked that I always thought it was a good thing that West Point beat us at pistol).

I talked about the almost balanced gender ratio in the Ellen "Swallow" Richards lobby (sometimes mentioning the quotes around the words "Swallow" as my favorite hack), and how women have graduated women since the beginning, whereas that school up the street didn't graduate women until 2000 (up until then, women only got degrees from Radcliffe). One of the mothers on a tour noted that I mentioned Harvard at least a dozen times. I was always happy to play up the friendly self-deprecating one-sided rivalry.

I talked about Tetris on IM Pei's Green Building. About the sleepy student discovering a Japanese tourist sketching the urinal in the Alvar Aalto designed Baker Hall one morning, or the moat that reflects light from beneath the Aero Saarinen MIT Chapel, or the 1/8 sphere of his auditorium.

My most memorable tour was for the mayor of Dalian, one of the largest cities in China, which I did in broken Chinese. I felt bad that I was the only representative of MIT his large entourage got to meet.

One of my favorite tours was the ones where only tourists came. And I could just talk about the fun stuff.

Good times.

Glad to see the tradition lives on.

Far better joke than those Old MIT t-shirts

I still have that shirt in my closet somewhere.

Chance Encounters

(back from Asia, so will return to posting the backlog of posts I have)

A friend of mine related to me a few stories of random encounters with people he had not heard from in years. My response is that this happens so often, I am no longer surprised.

A girl I was in marching band with in high school in new jersey, who I never kept in touch with, I later bumped into on a random vacaction in banff canada, and then years later, she turns up as a student at the orientation picnic in the MBA program I teach in.

A key paper I cite in my dissertation, turns out to be written by one of R-'s classmate in med school, who wrote the paper with a darthmouth econ professor, and two weeks ago, the econ prof shows up to give a talk at Cornell. That econ prof's normal collaborator is the economist I worked with at the White House, who went to the same summer school I did in high school, which we found out since we were both being interviewed by the summer school director in the same week.

Sitting in a random starbucks in the upper west side in new york city, there were limited seats, so I shared a table with a guy who asked to borrow the book review from the sunday nytimes I was reading. He was looking for the review of a book he publishes. turns out he's a book agent for social science books. 3 days later, I am having dinner with a visiting harvard prof back in Ithaca, who is talking about his book agent, who sure enough is the guy I chatted with back at Starbucks.

A friend of mine from college, whom I hadn't seen or talked to since college turned out to live on my street in baltimore.

So what are the odds? I guess physicists call this a Fermi problem.

So let's say you have 4,000 acquaintances that you'd recognize and remember. (My high school had 300 people per class, I'd probably recognize all of them, plus a few hundred from adjacent classes. say 1000 total. then 1000 from college. 1000 from grad school. 1000 from work and otherwise).

Assuming most are yuppies, there are maybe 100,000 students who went to a top college per year. so 1,000,000 people within 5 years of you. so you probably know 0.4% of them. and if you include friends of friends, that's probably lots more. so given that you see say 50 yuppies in any given day, you have a 20% (50 * 0.4%) chance of bumping into a random person on any given day in a new place. Which doesn't sound too far off.

Star Trek Reviewlet

Saw it the other night. Sort of had to with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. I normally don't like movies with that time travel premise (perhaps the only exceptions are Harry Potter and 12 Monkeys) but aside from that I enjoyed it. It was a satisfying experience though the plot had much of the same campiness as the original show. The casting was pretty spot on. They are indeed trying to create a new franchise though it that might be weird having a series of movies where the actors are all doing impressions of the previous crew. This one was fine as an homage and I enjoyed the plentiful references, but not sure if they can do it again. Good special effects which is a first for star trek. Still lame a$$ fight choreography. Sulu's (played by Harold sans Kumar) allusion to fencing (see Naked Time from the original series) could have been awesome but was poorly executed.

An easily likable (hence the 98% rotten tomatoes score) but not a great movie.

Final Grade: B

My name on Amazon.com

Actually, it is my friend Reza and his fiancee that has their book China in an Era of Transition: Understanding Contemporary State and Society Actors being published, but my quote is on the book jacket and thus on amazon.com, which is almost as cool:

“It is impossible to understand China's impact on global relations without understanding the interplay of the power structures that shape Chinese society. China in an Era of Transition provides important micro-analyses – on topics that range from intellectuals and ethnic minorities, to entrepreneurs and internet bloggers – illuminating the tensions that underlie the Chinese economic juggernaut; and in so doing, shatters the myth of the monolithic and unitary China.”

Quite bombastic, but figured that's appropriate for this sort of thing. Buy the book here, and I get a cut of the profits.

Diddit.com - The Ultimate for the Modern Obsession to Quantify all Experience

People have oft lamented the current generation's obsession to quantify all of its achievements. I remember when a friend of mine setup an online page to track how many UNESCO World Heritage sites his friends had been to, and how compelling it was to rack up a higher "score." Books for 1001 places to see/things to eat, etc before you die fill the bestseller list. Some may lament this obsession--I'm sure Sontag would, arguing we should live life in a state of Being as opposed to always counting--but I am happy that the new site diddit.com embraces it. It is a site of lists of life's experiences, designed to help you figure out new things to try, primarily by incentivizing you to fill up lists with your accomplishments. And of course, being a new web startup, in throws in a mix of social networking and Web 2.0.

I dunno, as an economist, I think quantification of stuff is great. It was nice going through a list of things to do before you die. I have always felt I've lived a pretty full life, but nice to see that out of the top 100 for example, I've done 80+, from try scuba, to dine at the White House, to be on tv, to see the redwoods of California, ride a horse, take a dance class, go hawaii, learn html, hit 21 playing blackjack, etc. Part of it is just quantification to make yourself feel good, but it does also introduce new things I want to do (run a marathon, visit the pyramids, visit every continent, go to the olympics, etc.) that I may not have thought of. Also a good chance to sit back and reflect on good memories, and good times.

The list of 100 things to eat is also fun, each bringing back a rush of memories (my first "real" tomato, fresh berries with R's aunt and uncle atop a mountain we spent 8 hours hiking, root beer floats with my grandmother in Taiwan at age 8, vodka shots at a party freshman year, grasshoppers at part of Jose Andres' contempo empire, shark's fin soup on my night in Beijing, single malt scotch at the scotch bar with R-'s friends in Baltimore, Abalone at our Hong Kong wedding banquet, the tasting menu at Jean Georges, Goulash in Hungary, rose water ice cream where I accidentally ate the cloth rose petal, Sacher Torte at the hotel Sacher in Vienna, deep frieds Snake from the art festival in Baltimore, GiFilte Fish with a couple jewish friends during passover, baked alaska on the cruise ship).

Kinda neat.

(And relevant to my research, there is a "showing" off angle to it. It is interesting to think about how conspicuous consumption works with experiential goods. Well you can still use experiential goods to signal, you just need the right opportunity to talk about it.)

Celebrity Sighting: Noxema Girl

From Celebrity Sightings

A spate of celebrity sightings these past couple days. Happened upon celebrity chefs Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa) and Marcus Samuellson (of Aquavit) yesterday, we happened to visit crate and barrel and zabar's where each was doing a book signing.

At lunch at Sarabeth's (reputedly best brunch in New York, though I'm not so sure) I overheard the conversation at the table next to mine, where someone was talking about how she got the giggles on stage recently, so I looked over, and saw "noxema girl" (aka Rebecca Gayheart)

Noxema has had many spokes-people over the years, but only one "noxema girl." She dropped off celebrity radar shortly afterwards, with a brief stint on my radar in the very shortlived sci-fi show Earth 2. She starred in a lot of noxema commercials in the early 90's, and everyone I knew just called her "noxema girl" years before I ever saw it in print. And that was back in the day when hardly anyone used the Internet (kind of hard to imagine today) so pretty neat how the meme of her nickname spread somehow.

I always wondered about meme spreading in the pre-Internet age. Like childhood games like Wall-ball and all the variants of tennis ball and wall that kids played during unsupervised time, the same way in the many elementary schools I went to. Or "circle circle dot dot, now I got a cootie shot" which also someone seemed universally known.

This, I was pondering after surreptitiously taking a photo, while pretending to check e-mail on my phone. Afterwards I turned back to my New York Times magazine, where a few pages later I found this quote in a Jennifer Aniston interview:

Q: How much do you hate cameras on phones?

A: My favorite move is when people pretend that they’re on the phone and they kind of dial and take the picture at the same time. You hope they’re doing it for themselves — that they’re not thinking, I’m going to dine out on you.

Starbucks Redeemed

I was always of the opinion that Starbucks was a last option. Another chain, I associated with McDonalds, that was on my avoid list. That was precisely the attitude that Starbucks in the past year has set out to change in their much advertised new corporate strategy. And at least for me, it has worked. I have been forced back into Starbucks for a few reasons. 1) Amazingly, the most comfy coffee shop in Ithaca is a Starbucks. By comfy I mean clean, bright, open, with comfy chairs. Believe me, I refused to believe that a college town like Ithaca wouldn't have a better one, but having tried many, I finally conceded Starbucks the victory. Gimme! still has much better coffee, but Starbucks was still nicer. 2) That from the front door of our apartment in the Upper West Side, you can see at least three Starbucks, but basically no other coffee shops exist. I searched long and hard, and didn't really find any. So I gave in. 3) The free wifi with purchase is a nice touch.

And having gone there, I am generally impressed. Service is nice, one day they offered a free coffee tasting of different beans, and the guy was very knowledgeable. Other times, free samples are nice. Their new House blend is actually quite good, both regular and decaf. Though their espresso is still dull. I started thinking about this in a quite nice Starbucks in Buffalo, where I got a free coffee for filling out a survey, which asked how they were doing. And I had to say, they were doing quite well.

(my one complaint is that a couple of the Starbucks in my neighborhood in New York smell unpleasant from time to time, though the smell I discovered is always correlated with the arrival of a couple of their unwashed regular patrons, which I guess you can't help in New York City)

One Degree of Kevin Bacon (and Gossip Girl folk)

I wandered into a Verizon store to check out the touch screen Blackberry, intrigued by the fact that the screen clicks, but the interface was totally befuddling, even to a former computer guy/blackberry devotee like myself, agreeing with Pogue that this was an epic fail in interface design on RIM's part. The upside of this jaunt was that as I was fiddling, the girl next to me who was equally befuddled by the phone, whispered "hey, do you know who Kevin Bacon is?" Having no idea where this going, I just said yes. "he's right over here. Sure enough there he was in baseball cap and sunglasses, huddled with phone, trying to look inconspicuous. I surreptitiously snapped a photo, feeling somewhat guilty, but I openly admit to the standard weakness that celebriy inspires.

See also, my Bobby Flay run in, as well as the random sighting of Penn Badgley and Blake Lively of Gossip Girl fame, getting photographed in Central Park.