The positive aspects of Globalization.

When I read the Undercover Economist my favourite chapeter was the one that explained why the cost of a cup of coffee at a train station is so extortionate because of cost of renting a space which will have such high coffee sales, and customers are willing to pay a premium. But the bit that amazed me the most was when the author explained that it's crazy that you can get a cup of coffee for £2.50 in the first place. The water alone must travel around 10 miles from the nearest clean source, the coffee machine is made in Italy, and the steel it's made from was manufactured in China from materials mined in Australia. The art project by Thomas Thwaites demonstrates this nicely, as he tries to reproduce a a toaster from scratch, including mining his own raw materials.

Though his point is how we're technologically ignorant of how even the simplest house hold object is to make and manufacture, its also shows how Globalization has really reduced the cost of manufactuing.

Happy festive season! All a bit quiet, but new welcome picture added.

I was hoping to get a lot done on this site over the Christmas period, but I didn't account for how busy I'd be. When you have a moderately large family, you spend a lot of time visiting and being visited by relatives. Who new? As it was a relaxed Christmas I decided to stay away from properly expanding my PHP or javascript / python knowledge, and made this happy robot picture (he's saying "Hi !!" in binary.)  After sketching it, I outlined it using Adobe Illustrator, and then polished it up in photoshop. I've got anther small project in mind, that could maybe even be used as a website background.