Sao Paulo (Photo by andredeak via Flickr)
As I was leafing through the FT, I came upon an amazing photo of two soaring towers in Shanghai. In the foreground was a construction site. The photo was sexy enough to lure me into reading the paper’s mining-industry analysis.
Mining! What was I thinking? Well, it was all worth it for this one little nugget – buried under reams of text about copper prices and the stockpiling of zinc by China:
Rio Tinto, the multinational miner, reminded investors of these fundamentals … . The urbanisation rate of the Chinese population is still only 45 percent, and that is not even mentioning India or Brazil — “50,000 new skyscrapers are needed by 2025″, it adds.
Really? Fifty thousand skyscrapers in the next 15+ years? That’s about 3,300 per year, or 63 a week or nine a day for 15 years!
OK. So I have no idea how Rio Tinto built its projection. For instance, how do they define what qualifies as a “skyscraper.” And I also don’t know how many skyscrapers have been built, on average, each year over the last 15 or 20 years. Maybe Rio’s number is not so amazing.
On the face of it, though, it’s kind of mind boggling.
It’s just a week after the best snow of the year that we’ve had the most warmth of the winter! I guess spring is here.
We received 6-8 inches of snow last week, as these photos from Capitol Hill attest. This week we’re luxuriating in temperatures that have ranged from the 50s and up into the 70s. Nice! I won’t provide photos of the warmth because they just aren’t as compelling. But, trust me, it’s more satisfying to walk through a warm DC day than it is to slog through a cold DC morning.
I visited Atlanta in the fall(?) of 2008 on business. It was the first time I can ever remember staying in a hotel room in the city. I presented a session at the SPJ 2008 conference about using social media as a tool for modern journalism. It could have gone better. I’m not as good in front of a crowd as I thought I was! 
But I did enjoy visiting with my good friend Terry Goggin. We met while working at CNN.com. Today he works at CNN International.
What made our reunion so much fun was Terry’s insistence on posting a YouTube video of me riding in an elevator at CNN Center. It wasn’t much of a ride for me. But the video was a thrill for my son. He just requested another viewing.
After reading up on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack at home, I checked out a Wired story about the tunnels connecting Gaza to Egypt. We’ve heard a lot about these tunnels in recent weeks. But I hadn’t seen them until I checked out the photos on Wired. So I Googled it and, naturally, found obvious examples of photos from the tunnel front.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Most of everything we might want to know and see is out there, if we just take the time to look for it.
Living and working in downtown Washington, D.C., is a special experience. It’s monumental, it’s urban (in a good way) and it’s social. But still, there is the nagging concern that — however small the chance of it actually happening — I live in the blast zone for a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital.
Thankfully, Wired has provided a Wiki page on how to “Suvive a Nuclear Blast.” Sadly, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it is somewhat reassuring that I’m not alone in worrying about this possibility. Right?