Funky France

France has never been high on my list of places to go simply because I think of it as a destination for the snooty and the senile. My choices veer towards Peru or Ladakh ... France could wait until we turn senile.

Still, circumstances turned out such that a family vacation in France was the most convenient thing we could do this year, so it was to France that we went. Can a visit to France be funky, when one doesn't care too much for people-watching in Parisian cafes or go weak-kneed at the thought of 200 varieties of cheese?

Our favorite part of the trip to France was the day we rented a car and drove out into the country side, specifically a visit to Cordes sur Ciel, a medieval village built on a hill. The setting was beautiful, the drive was nice and the hike up the hill through the village was charming. Too bad no one lives in the place but people who ply the tourist trade.

 The ride back, through the vineyards of Galliac was also quite nice. We didn't stop though, because we were traveling with kids ...

In the Versailles palace, our attentions were drawn to the playful over the regal.  Thus, I loved the lion in lace:

while the wife & daughter were drawn to the shoes in a hall full of chandeliers:

The shoes, in case the picture isn't clear, were made of pots, pans and lids.  I'm sure there's some feminist message in this choice and its placement in the fanciest hall in the palace, but that message escaped most visitors to the palace.

We gave the kids the choice of one place to go to.  The 7-year old wanted Disneyworld (of course), but I vetoed that, so she used her choice to decide that we'd climb the Eiffel tower. The views as one climbs the tower were wonderful -- the hard steel against the shimmering water of the Seine provided some breathtaking views:

From the top of the Eiffel, though, it was just a standard panaroma.  Even the Arc De Triomphe has been copied so much (there's one in Pyongyang of all places) that this panorama could very well be any city in the world:

For his choice, the ten-year old chose the sewers of Paris.  The city-beneath-the-city, the location of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables ... this was a choice I wasn't going to veto, even if the son's only reason for choosing the sewers was to gross out his sister.  So, off we went.  This was a bit of a let down since the tour through the sewers seemed a little haphazard, but it was still quite fun:

One more off the bucket list

I think I know why Disney chose Paris when they were looking for a place in Europe to put their new theme park -- Paris makes tourists get used to standing in long lines.

We waited 2.5 hours in line to enter the chateau at Versailles and ended up having no time to go around the gardens. Having learned our lesson, we got to the Louvre earlier. The line to enter it, which stretched over 1 kilometer, took "only" 1.5 hours.

Versailles

Line to enter the Louvre was 1 km long

The palace at Versailles was rich and fascinating. I have seen palaces elsewhere, but nothing really compares to this one.  It's one thing to have a fancy chandelier

but a hall full of them?  No wonder royal heads rolled in the French revolution.


At the Louvre, we saw the "highlights" first.  The kids remained in the game through the Winged Victory, Wedding Feast at Cana, Mona Lisa to the Venus de Milo. And then their interest flagged. We never managed to interest them in seeing the Dutch paintings or the Egyptian wing ... oh, well!

Once we were in the palace and in the museum, the crowds ceased to be much of a problem -- you could always catch a moment at every spot, but it was rare that you would find the opportunity to take a photograph without a few strange faces in it.  And so, I got this one knocked off my bucket list:

That didn't take long

18 hours after the 7-year old landed in France, she says:  "what? another church?"

Interestingly Structured Deal on Amazon Kindle DX

If you've been eyeing the Kindle DX (the large e-ink one), Amazon is running a weird deal until Father's day.  The Kindle DX by itself is $379, but if you buy it with the official Kindle cover, the price drops to $299.

I find this kind of deals fascinatingly innumerate -- why would any one buy the Kindle by itself? Why doesn't Amazon simply give a discount on the device instead of applying the discount only if you also buy the cover? Don't they essentially lose money on the covers?  It can't be advertising for the cover (the razor-blade analogy) because most people buy a cover only once.

Of course, Amazon is probably not doing this without a reason -- it's probably a price discrimination scheme. But what does the scheme discriminate for? People in a hurry vs. cautious buyers? People who read the product page vs. people who don't? People who can do math vs. people who can't? People who are willing to throw away a cover they need vs. people who won't want to waste it?

Change your password. Now.

LinkedIn's hashed set of passwords has leaked (6.5 million of them) and apparently they were doing Mickey-Mouse stuff in terms of password security (full details here).

So, public service message:

1. Change your password for your email, online banking, and Facebook.
2. Use three different passwords for each of the above.  You don't want to use the same password for each.
3. An easy-to-remember, very secure password scheme is explained in this XKCD cartoon.
4. Reuse a fourth, easy-to-remember password (abcd1234) for all the other junk, like newspaper subscriptions.

Some explanations:

1. I think we all understand why your bank password should be secure. Your email should be even more secure because anyone who gets into your email can reset any password they please.  Why Facebook? So that people don't get into your social network and send letters claiming you are stuck in Madrid. You know that old aunt of yours might fall for that one. Protect her by choosing a secure Facebook password.
2. Why use different passwords? So that a leak of one password, like the one on LinkedIn, does not compromise your other accounts.
3. Passwords should be easy for a human to remember and hard for a computer to guess. One option is to create a catch phrase, rather than letters.  So, for example, a very secure password for Facebook would be  DontWorryImNot./Madrid  (I am using the Unix dot-slash instead of the word in).  The length of this password, along with the use of symbols makes it extremely secure.

Why fracking in North Dakota makes Rajastani farmers happy

Fracking, the technology that has dramatically increased oil and gas production in the American Plains, is also having an equally dramatic effect in the desert northwest of India.

It's not that the Thar desert in India has oil. It's that it grows cluster beans and cluster beans are used to produce a type of gum that is needed to increase the viscosity of the liquid used for fracking.

It's a small, globalized world when fracking in North Dakota puts money into the pockets of a farmer in Rajastan.

Macroeconomics for kids

One of the unanticipated joys of fatherhood is coming up with explanations that are simple but not simplistic.

The 7-year old: "Appa, you know how China makes all the stuff that is in the stores? Why do they keep sending the stuff to America?"

Me: "Well, some of the money we pay at the store goes back to China. That's why they send us the stuff they make."

The 10-year old: "But in China, they have different money.  What will they do with our dollars?"

Just when I was wondering how to explain treasury bonds and China's need to industrialize to the kids, I found out that I didn't have to because the 10-year old had found an acceptable answer  "Oh, yeah. ATMs."

One of these days, I need to talk to them about unexamined assumptions. But today's not the day. Today, I'm glad of my narrow escape.