Month: December 2012

Trader elephants

At the main Pondicherry temple, an elephant will bless you — by tapping its trunk on your head — if you hand it some money. Of course this is a temple elephant and it is also a Mengerian elephant. The elephant has no use for money but understands that it is a general medium of exchange. The elephant hands the money over to the temple authority and is later rewarded with food.

The elephant is not merely trading, but it is engaged in indirect exchange and thus in monetary economics. There is in fact a sign up forbidding such Mengerian transactions, but the elephant seems not to notice it.

NYC Built on Dredge

fascinating piece about how the army corps of engineers continues to do massive scale landscaping around ny harbor.

On the periphery of the city, at the littoral edge between water and land, a type of landscape architecture is reshaping New York at a monumental scale. It is difficult to see. It happens away from most people, far from the eyes of architects. Most of it happens underwater. It’s the landscaping that occurs when we mechanically lift and remove sand and sediment from one place and dump it somewhere else, an act best known as dredging.