Hyper-connected to the rest of the world through an ample offering of long-haul flights, low crime rates, great education and health system, fair balance of sunny and warm days, plenty of ways to stay informed, availability of drinks after hours, good public transit, lots of green areas and a will to keep them green. This is the method behind the first Monocle Quality of Life Index.
For international flight connections it would be Paris but for an airport it would have to be Munich. On crime it would be a Japanese city – either Tokyo or Kyoto would do. Zürich and Helsinki would be our key contributors for hospitals and schools while Sydney and Honolulu offer the best weather. [...] For a good night out we’d want to be resident in Madrid, Tokyo or Barcelona and for getting home we’d opt for Munich’s public transport and Copenhagen’s bike network if we were sober enough to pedal home ourselves.
With a well documented rating behind each one of the cities in the list, it is going to be hard to argue that they’ve done their homework, but it still feels very subjective. In any case, [...]
Nothing like finding hidden connections between ideas, specially when they seemed so distant. My post lonelytv seemed a good exercise in interpreting McLuhan, which is a worthy cause in its own. It also seemed a good way to discretely reveal facts about me: I don’t watch TV; at least not in the same way that most do. I count it among my favorites posts, yet it also seemed to be out of place in this blog. Up until now.
One of those connections I was referring to has surfaced in a very unexpected way: a discussion about the need for sound to create a very specific atmosphere within our application reminded me of the word acoustic used in the post.
McLuhan had established decades ago the consequences of TV as a new medium that would return society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an “acoustic” world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. “Acoustic” was mostly used as a metaphor for “many things happening at once”. I believe that his position is even more accurate today to describe the transition from TV to a more fluid [...]
Barely a couple of weeks into my new job and I’m already finding myself immersed into fascinating research on why we travel. There are statistics by regions, demographics and other dimensions which are probably not too different from what is available out there. But so many numbers got us thinking about the soft side of the problem and the discussion became a revelation.
If you look around in your local newspaper or the web, most resources will try to sell you a destination as the ultimate objective of your trip. This makes sense since you are boarding a plane to go to a different place. In some cases they will try to sell you exclusive experiences based on a destination that is mostly unreachable by other people. The majority of travelers will settle for this pitch as they have been programmed to assume that their vacations are all about visiting all those places that people talk about. People will only pay for packaged experiences that have been tried many times in the exact same way.
There is another category of travelers that are investing more than their money and time into these experiences. [...]
