EclecticLip

For those of you who’ve never seen bacteria grow in a petri dish, here’s a cool little animation showing the spread of Wal-Mart across the US. It isn’t quite exponential growth — though it seems that way for awhile — I think it’s more of an S-curve (sigmoid curve — like a pH chart.)

The chart is probably a good proxy for US population centres — and thus, population density.  I believe Wal-Mart targets town 30,000 and bigger.  Anyways, you can see how (relatively) empty the western half of the US is, compared to the eastern half.  It’s as if there was a dividing line.  (Note: I’m excepting the highly populated strip along the West Coast).

We went to the Steveston marina in Richmond on the weekend.  The fishers there priced their catch uniformly — which I’m assuming wasn’t an unplanned coincidence.  It’s unlikely any of them had a big enough competitive advantage to undercut their peers and offer lower pricing to consumers.  Even if they did, they’d probably figure it better to pocket the extra profit instead risking being shunned by their partners-in-trade.  I believe Canada’s big banks work on the same system. 

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I was reading a book of Viking wisdom yesterday.  It included the memorable line ‘no lamb for the lazy wolf‘ (a corollary for ‘the early bird gets the worm’) but peculiarly, no tips on plundering villages.  Personally, I prefer ‘the second worm doesn’t get eaten’, but that’s just me.

Banking and fairies below the fold! 

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The second Obama-McCain debate was the other night; I caught a replay after coming home from ball hockey.  Obama won this one so handily, it reminded me of Chris Rock’s description of the first Rocky: “a movie which finishes with a black brother beating up a white man for forty-five minutes?  What’s not to like?”

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