Every Kind of Craft

I did promise to write about the around the world trip that I took in November, so let’s start with the planning. I know a lot of people who say they like to travel but hate planning. I’m not one of those people. I love planning travel. I’m generally happy to offer travel advice to other people, but planning my own trips are one of my favorite things.

The real genesis of this trip was in May 2024, when I was in Lisbon before the Travelers’ Century Club conference in the Azores. I did a hop-on hop-off bus tour and went to the Lisbon Oceanarium, which is one of the largest aquariums in Europe. That got me wondering where the largest ones are. One of which is the National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium in Hengchun, Taiwan.

When I was planning this trip, I did a bit more research and one site recommended Xpark, which is near the Taipei Airport instead. It was much easier to get to and there were other major sites to see in Taipei, so I decided that would be a good choice.

But the real reason for the trip was that back in 2000 I had taken a trip in which I circumnavigated the world going eastward. My route was Los Angeles to St. Petersburg, Russia (via Frankfurt, Germany), a train to Moscow where I joined a tour to Tuva, Siberia, and Mongolia, which ended with a flight to Beijing before flying home to Los Angeles.

Because I am slightly crazy, I decided that I should also circumnavigate the world going westward. I’m not sure where I saw an ad for a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2 from Hamburg, Germany to New York. The dates worked for me and the price was reasonable. I was also able to use frequent flyer miles for the international flights. That resulted in not quite enough days in either Taiwan or Hamburg, but so it goes. I’ll write about each leg in the next few posts.

I started writing this before I left on my trip. I suspect I have more things that I intended to include, but I have no idea where they are. I did add a couple of recent items at the end.

I clip interesting things from magazines planning to comment on them later on. Here is an attempt to catch up on them a little bit.

From MIT Spectrum - Spring 2024: This was from an article about the problem of sustainability in the textile industry. There was the astonishing (to me, at least) information that the textile manufacturing industry produces more carbon dioxide equivalent per year than the aviation and maritime industries combined. The other astonishing tidbit was that “the average garment is worn just seven times before it ends up in a landfill.” I, for one, have been known to wear the same garment seven times in the same month. And don’t get me started on how old some of my clothing is. The other day, I was wearing a shirt that I know I bought in 1998. It is getting a bit raggedy at the cuffs, but it’s still usable for travel.

From Technology Review Reader Mailbag: I am not sure what issue this was from. Someone sent in a question asking if it’s true that if everybody just avoided words like “please,” “hello,” and so on when querying AI models, we could save a considerable amount of energy. The response from a climate reporter who had coauthored a story about the energy consumption of large language models said that, essentially, it’s more important for companies to disclose how much energy AI uses “rather than telling us we should be rude to robots.” Personally. I enjoy being rude to robots. Fuck off, ChatGPT!

In Her Footsteps: I didn’t note which issue of MIT Alumni News had this blurb from the class of 1987. The Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) created a series of walking tours called In Her Footsteps. Each tour has 9 or 10 stops relating in some way to MIT women’s history. You can find an example on the website of the clio.com. The clio.com site looks like it has a lot of interesting tours and it would be worth some time exploring it.

By the way, when I was looking up an article about this, I ran across the statement that today “43% of MIT first year students identify as women, 44% as men.” That implies that 13% identify as something else (or, presumably, no gender) which is higher than I would have guessed. I usually see figures under 5%. Those are suspect since they come from studies by sources known to be biased, but I haven’t seen estimates higher than 10% before.

Pneumatic Tubes: An article in the July / August 2024 issue of Technology Review discussed the return of pneumatic tube systems. They are particularly common in hospitals, used for transporting samples and medications. But they are also used in factories and warehouses. There are also a handful of places that use pneumatic tubes for garbage disposal, including Roosevelt Island in New York City and Stockholm. I would never have guessed this.

Mennonites: The most recent issue of MIT Alumni News had a story about Madonna Yoder ’17 who is an origami artist, specializing in tessellations. The part of this that intrigued me is that she grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia “where professors from Virginia Tech filled the pews of her Mennonite church.” I don’t know about you, but my mental image of Mennonites is as farmers, not as college professors and certainly not at a well-respected engineering school. Not only did she go to MIT (where she got a degree in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences), but her brother got a Ph.D. in materials engineering at Virginia Tech.

The Moon: That same recent issue of MIT Alumni News (November / December 2025) had a note from a member of the class of 1976 who wrote “But what I share with my cohort is that any of us, celebrated and unsung alike, can sit with a child and look up at the brilliant full moon together and tell them, ‘Yes, it’s lovely, but you should have seen it before it was walked on.’” I literally laughed out loud at that.