Our neighbor... "The Economist"

This week my advisor told me about a news that came out in December on the The Economist website. You can find it here. I suggest reading it from the bottom up as it should reflect the publishing of a weekly diary.

The funny story about this is that through this news we found out that the The Economist's US West Coast correspondent is our neighbor and frequent customer of our street's coffee shop. As he describes it:

North gate of campus (...) it is ten minutes on foot from my house, and next to Brewed Awakening, a café with almost-the-best espressos in town, where Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labour secretary and now a Berkeley professor, and various other authors and academics, hang around before they’ve combed their hair that day. I’ve practically made it my branch office.

Our house is by the way also 10 min away from the North Gate... Another interesting thing about this news is that it describes the Silicon Valley in a quite peculiar way... In the author's words:

"the Valley is going to seem shockingly dull to anybody who happens not to be a computer geek."

He also does some comparing between Standford/S.Valley and Berkeley... and just to tease the Stanford people and boost the Bears' ego a bit more, here are his words:

"The intellectual climate, such as it is save for discussions of computer code, pales against that of the East Bay hills around Berkeley, home to the other big university in the Bay Area. A lot of Valley people, and Valley firms, are choosing those places as home."

He does also a nice job at depicting some Berkeleyans:

"Of course the ageing hippies in Berkeley are Democrats―and aggressive ones, judging by the bumper stickers on the Volvos fighting for parking space at the organic-produce Berkeley Bowl."

I must say he's not talking about our car... he is nevertheless talking about the place where Marta buys most of our vegetables and fruit: the Berkeley Bowl. He also mentions something else that's related with Marta... when he talks about the Bay Bridge (the one Marta is working to replace):

"spending a lot of time doing just that―driving across one of the most tedious bridges in America, the Bay Bridge, and over a toll plaza that must levy a ferocious tax on America’s productivity, given the number of entrepreneurs and innovators who sit idling in its traffic jams not only at rush hour but at far less forgivable times of day"

Oh well... life has funny coincidences...