Author: Liz Aab

As part of my friend Silvia Chiang’s wedding last week, I was asked to prepare a short talk on the topic of “Humility.” Thought you might have fun with this. Congratulations to Silvia and Parker!

On humility
Ode to an Onion

Oh onion, humble onion —
How modest you are. You never seek attention, growing underground, dressed in brown.
Then, when peeled and brought to light, you hide in white.
So that you stay overlooked, when cooked, you turn clear:
You disappear.

But onion, humble onion —
It’s not this modest humility which awes.
It’s how humbly you serve, enhancing everything around you, adapting yourself in a thousand ways.
Diced or sliced, you turn bland salads into spicy fests of flavor.
Or sauteed with ginger chicken, you melt into caramel, sweet and tender.

For onion, humble onion —
What recipe do you not humbly grace?
Sauces, stews, salads, sandwiches, stir fry, shish kebab,
Meats, marinades, curries — cuisines of all types, from so many cultures.
You unite us all in flavor.

So onion, humble onion —
Though it’s not your nature, accept this song of praise.
And remind us, next time we see you, hidden on our plates, to be like you :
As humble as an onion.

– Liz Aab

Why, really, do nerds wear glasses?  As a nearsighted nerd myself, I’d often heard the usual reasoning: reading strains your eyes.  But surely non-nerds strain their eyes too, don’t they?  Like by looking at screens like this one?

I think the causality is wrong: it’s not nerdism that causes bad vision;  it’s bad vision that creates nerds.

I observed this phenomenon a year and half ago, at the start of my MBA at London Business School. I sat in the back of the U-shaped 80-person lecture theatre (yes, with an “re”).  When our first lecturer projected an Excel spreadsheet on the whiteboard, I had to move closer to the front — I couldn’t see the microscopic print from far away.  The past year and a half, I’ve asked to sit in the front 2 rows for all my classes, so that I don’t have a problem seeing the board clearly.

Now, what happens when you sit close to the front?  You speak more often and with less inhibition, because you literally don’t see the 70 other students behind you in the class.  You don’t have to shout across a long distance, so you see education more like a conversation more than a speech.  You can’t get distracted by your iPhone, because the professor will definitely catch you.  And so day after day, you are more engaged in the class than your peers in the back row, you pay more attention, you ask more questions… You are a nerd!

Remember back to where this all started, to when you got your very first pair of blue plastic glasses. Your vision had been squinty just before you saw the eye doctor, so your 10 year old self inched closer to the chalkboard.  Once there, the teacher called on you more, you asked more questions, you talked less with your neighbors, you doodled less with your crayons… You became a nerd!

By the time your vision was corrected (and it had to get corrected each year as your eyeballs grew, remember), your position at the front of the classroom, and in your class, was set. You would always be a nerd.

If you did a study comparing the distance students are from the whiteboard with their academic performance, I’d bet you’d get statistically significant correlations. And if you extended this study to see how people did in life after school, I suspect you’d get lasting effects.

If my theory is right, then it might be worth seeing what happens if schools have no “front” or “back” of the classroom.  If all 4 walls had chalkboards on them and our seats swiveled around, everyone would have some time when they were equally close to the board. Would everyone become a nerd, or no one at all?

It’s an interesting topic, and something I thought you might be interested in looking at closer.  Assuming, of course, you are a nerd.

Yours,
Liz
www.lizaab.com

If you want to dictate someone’s character, buy their shoes.

No, this Aabservation isn’t about how shoes look — it’s about how shoes feel. Sure, a shoe’s appearance sends a message about the wearer’s social group and personality. But a deeper reason, I think, is that shoes physically affect how we walk. And how we walk affects our mood.

Two weeks ago (wearing slightly heeled boots), I power walked around New York City. I’d arrive each place somewhat breathless from walking briskly, my brain whirling with the increased blood flow. One such whirling thought was this: could the city’s energy stem from the fact that its residents literally have to run around it, and therefore end up at each meeting physically energized?

As I got my breath back, I watched closely how people walked. Amazingly, people’s shoes were completely affecting their gait. Next time you’re outside, try it yourself: watch people walking down the street, but don’t look at their shoes. Then, just by their gait, try to guess what shoes they are wearing — not just whether they are sneakers or how high the heel is, but how shiny they are, how new, how well they fit. Chances are you’ll be able to describe their shoes most of the time.

To see why shoes have such an impact on our mood, let’s take an easy example: the flip flop. You cannot run in a flip flop. You can’t even hustle down the street at a New York pace. Your toes are vulnerable to being trodden on, so you are less aggressive walking. To keep the flip flop on your foot, you have to tense up your toes and lunge forward more tentatively with each step. Dog poop is terrifying.

Now, wear a boot. The heel clicks like a metronome as you clatter across the concrete — you are on a mission. You could step on anything and squish it without a care. You feel in control, protected, powerful.

Unless it has high heels. Take the most driven, self-confident woman you know, put her in (or really on) a pair of high heels, and not only can she not rule the world, she can’t walk five blocks. Due to her shoes, she’s become vulnerable. She looks around, like a ballerina, for a prince in stable shoes to hold on to — which is probably why she chose to wear such silly things in the first place. (And why he decided to wear those power Oxfords — solid, stable, secure.)

Shorten her heel to something a bit more reasonable and voila, you get the power pump. She’s a bit more stable now, but taller than she’d be at home; in her power pump, she doesn’t have to look up at (or really to) as many people. The calf muscle is already engaged, ready to pounce.

Yet though this seems obvious, think of the last time you consciously thought about how a new pair of shoes would affect your gait. We try on shoes standing in front of the mirror, not parading around Parade of Shoes. There’s a gap there that the MBA student in me wants filled: for some shoe company to really study this relationship between shoes, gait and mood, and scientifically develop shoes that help us better become the person we want to be. Mood shoes.

If that’s too commercial a challenge, how about this one instead: isn’t it a peculiar coincidence that history is the story of men with boots conquering those with flip flops? Might Jared Diamond have got it wrong — that really it’s Guns, Germs and Boots? Apologies in advance, Dr Diamond: I didn’t mean to step on your toes.

Cheers,

Liz Aab http://www.lizaab.com/

Water in the air is a funny thing. Freeze it the right way, and it comes down in flakes so fluffy that snowboarding feels like flying. Freeze it the wrong way, and it shuts down London Heathrow airport for days when you are trying to get back to New York for Christmas.

With so many thousands of us stranded here in Europe, it’s easy to focus on the water in the air you see. But more intriguing still is the water in the air you don’t see — which once understood, helps explain everything from why we get sick in the winter to why global warming is dangerous.

I stumbled upon this little known fact last winter, watching my cheap Chinese humidifier spray a pathetic strand of fog into the dry Beijing air. Was this thing actually accomplishing anything?, I pondered. I mean, seriously, was that litre of water really going to make a difference? How much water is there in my room anyway — a mililiter? a hundred liters? I had not the foggiest idea.

Before I tell you the answer, take a guess. We don’t usually know this number because humidity gets quoted in relative terms (e.g. 70%), not absolute ones (i.e. grams per cubic meter). Which makes sense: how dry the air feels reflects how readily water evaporates off our skin (and from our sore winter throats). That in turn depends on how saturated the air is, not how much absolute water is in it.

Ok, here’s the answer: air at room temperature is saturated when it holds about 20 grams of water per cubic meter (20 teaspoons if you don’t do grams). So my 4m x 4m x 3m meter room could hold about 1,000 grams or 1 litre of water at saturation, so hmm… yep, pumping a quarter litre of fog into the air would raise relative humidity from a dry 25% to a comfortable 50%. Humidifiers work!

But promoting humidifiers wasn’t what inspired this Aabservation. (Though I am excited to now have an Amazon referrals sidebar on my blog, which you are welcome to play with…) What I also stumbled upon that dry Beijing morning was that 20 grams is only the quantity of water that saturates air at room temperature. Drop the temperature to 10 C (50 F), and air can only hold 9 grams of water — half as much as at 20 C.

Which is why winter air indoors is so dry. Think about it: even if snowing outside (100% humidity), at 0 C air contains less than 4 grams of water per cubic meter. Bring that same dry air inside, heat it up to room temperature (which you’ll remember can hold 20 grams of water), and 4 grams becomes just 1/5 of the total amount of water the air can hold — or an uncomfortable 20% humidity.

No wonder we get sick and our throats feel dry in the winter. Indeed, low absolute humidity is a good predictor of flu transmission, according to a recent study.*

Now think more macro, and you’ll understand how even a few degrees increase in global climate can have a powerful impact on storm intensity. Air at 30C (86F) can hold a whopping 30 grams of water, 32% more water than air just 5C (9F) cooler (see table). That’s 32% more actual water that can then be absorbed into storm clouds and dumped on your beach!

Of course, I am clearly not a meteorologist and this Aabservation doesn’t take into account factors like atmospheric pressure and cloud formation patterns. But hey — this water in air thing is a kind of intriguing, no?

To close, here’s a picture from the Australian government that explains the relationship between humidity and temperature beautifully:

That’s enough about water in the air for one night. Now back to contemplating water in the airport — you know, the stuff that froze Heathrow to a standstill and has pushed my December 21st flight to New York back to December 25th.

On the bright side, maybe I’ll bump into Santa in the air that day. Maybe he’s even bought me a humidifier.

Merry Christmas from London,
Liz

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I leave China tomorrow, after four and a half years here.  I am heading out to get an MBA at London Business School (LBS), a two year program that has me graduating in the summer of 2012 (just in time for the London Olympics!). 

As my time in China comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a great deal about endings.  They don’t happen in a moment or even a day;  it’s not an “end,” after all, but an “ending.”  I am now, for instance, writing from a hotel in Beijing, as I moved out of my apartment this morning.  Did I stop living in Beijing this morning already; or will that happen tomorrow, maybe when my flight leaves the tarmac?  Ending three years at Kamsky Associates has also been a gradual ending.  While my last day was June 18th, I started transitioning most accounts to my colleagues long before, and will surely stay connected to the people I met there for many years to come.

But while my time in China is ending, there was a clear moment today when my time in Beijing abruptly ended:  when I walked away from my bike.  You see, China is a country — a concept. But Beijing is a place.  We tend to think that places are concepts too, perhaps defined by the people in them, their vibe, their ascetics, their history, their ideals.  But I would argue a place is just that:  a place, a physical location.  Maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading Omnivore’s Dilemma and watching too much of BBC’s Life series, but I do think that our brains are hard-wired to pay particularly close attention to our physical surroundings.  It’s important for survival to know how to get home, where to find food, and where to avoid becoming food as well.  Or if that’s too caveman-esque of an example, how’s this:  what I suspect I remember most clearly from my childhood are the locations of the hidden “1-UPs” in Super Mario Brothers.  Indeed, now two decades later, if you put a Nintendo controller back in my hands, I bet I would still know that the 1-UP was hidden in the red brick four steps to the left of that pit (you know, the one near the two black-shelled turtles that hit each other and change direction just as you come on screen).

Like a Nintendo controller, my bicycle helped me understand Beijing by letting me understand its “placeness”.  When some people think of Beijing they think of the Olympics, or Communism, or cheap ties.  For me, though, Beijing was the (unnecessarily high) speed bump near my apartment, and the smooth and rewarding downgrade heading east off Dongsishitiao, and the patter of the packed ping pong tables near Jianguomenqiao that I would pass on my way to work.  And, since I could bike to most destinations in under half an hour, regardless of traffic, my bike helped make this sprawling and often congested city accessible.

So, you can imagine that abandoning my bike today (albeit to the kind ownership of a friend and colleague) was really hard.  I wasn’t just leaving a bike, I was leaving the tool that let me play in this amazing city, get around it, and, in my way, understand it.  Outside of Beijing, I can still read about the city’s economic and political developments.  But how will I know if they finally put a pedestrian traffic light on the western crosswalk of Xin Dong Lu and Dongzhimenwai?

Hmm, it’s getting to be that strange time between night and morning now.  A good time, it seems, for this Aabservation to come to an ending.

This and all Aabservations are archived at http://www.lizaab.com/

It’s late April and still winter in Beijing, but two months ago, I got a preview of summer when I was in Brazil. I used to think that New York was halfway around the world from Beijing. But after my 14 hour flight to JFK (where I stopped to have lunch in the airport with my dad), I boarded yet another 10 hour flight to Sao Paulo – 17,599km all told as the crow flies. Only Argentina would be farther away.

It’s now been a while since I was there and this interminable Beijing winter has messed with my mind, so I apologize for only sharing the impressions of Brazil that I can still recall. I was there for about a week, in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, and some of the coastal beach towns, mostly to see a good friend and her fiancé who are living there this year, and partially to replenish my body’s store of Vitamin D. I was not there to observe anything intensely, except perhaps how to make a proper caipirinha.

Having said that, here’s what managed to stick in my mind:

1) Obrigada: I clearly don’t speak Portuguese. After living in China for 4 years, when I even tried to speak Spanish, it came out Mandarin. I did learn one word, obrigada, which means “thank you”, and think that’s all you really need. It’s said in the slow, chilled way that all Portuguese seems to spoken there — just enjoying the sound of itself. I don’t know if all Brazilian people are kind and helpful, but certainly the ones we met were (except that taxi driver that gave us a tour of all of Sao Paulo on “the way” back from the Carnival parade). People seemed happy to try to help everywhere we went — so really all you needed to be able to say was obrigada.

2) Diversity: When the flight attendant started speaking to me in Portuguese, I realized that — unlike in China — you cannot tell by looking at someone whether they are Brazilian. Brazil is full of immigrants. How well they get along I leave to other people to answer; the sun was too bright to tell from my beach blanket.

3) Food: Meat, fish, fruit — all amazingly fresh and well-prepared. No wonder my jeans were tight after a week there.

4) Carnival (Mardi Gras): We watched a Carnival parade in Sao Paulo the night we arrived, which lasted for 5 or 6 hours (longer than we did, anyway). The parade went down the middle of a street lined with stadium seats, to which one bought tickets. There were a thousands of people from the local communities wearing extremely elaborate costumes and dancing/shuffling to a repeating samba chorus. Ever few hundred dancers, there would be a fifty-foot tall float, often of a person dancing, with more people dancing on it. At the end, torn up costumes were lying around everywhere.

5) So pretty: Rio de Janiero must be the most beautiful city in the world, with tall buildings woven between green hills and blue lakes. And how our friend managed to keep his eye on the road when we were driving up the coast is a mystery — so pretty everywhere. I hear there’s a rain forest somewhere in there too…

6) Thumbs Up: This I loved: everyone gives each other a thumbs up after asking for directions, or having a door opened, or getting change back, whatever. There was just something really chilled out about the people there, and this thumbs up thing underscored it. Even before I arrived in Brazil, when I was getting my visa at the Brazilian Embassy here in Beijing, the Embassy guard just told me to swing the fence open and go on in. In the U.S. embassy, by contrast, you have to walk through four layers of xray machines, marines, and double-locked doors to get inside.

Sure, there’s more things to observe about a massive country like Brazil — poverty, development, BRIC status, sushi, churches and cemeteries, and helicopters come to mind — but let’s do this instead: when I see you next, I’ll make you a caipirinha, and we’ll find somewhere sunny to chat about it all. Would that work for you? Awesome. Obrigada.

http://www.lizaab.com