Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: June 2014

Persian Gulf cities are built with foreign labor on imported sand

Sand is used in everything from silicon chips, to toothpaste, to glass, to buildings. It’s our most-used natural resource after water and air. Huge amounts of sand are used in construction— 200 tons to build a house, 3000 tons for a hospital, 30,000 tons for a kilometer of highway— but it turns out that it has to be the right kind of sand. This has led, incredibly, to a situation in which 3,500 Australian companies now export sand to the Middle East.

That’s right. Cities that are located on the edge of deserts are importing their sand from the Indian Ocean and Pacific, just like they’re importing their labor. Pretty mind-boggling.

Savina Venkova, a former intern at the Earth Policy Institute and future sustainable development scholar, writes about this strange situation, and its serious environmental consequences.

Einstein and everyday thinking

There’s a famous quote by Albert Einstein that “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” I’d heard it a number of times, but today I ran across a note by Carnegie Mellon psychologist David Klahr pointing out that Einstein’s aim was not to make science seem simple, but to call attention to the complexity of normal thinking. For Einstein continues:

It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot possibly be restricted to the examination of concepts of his own specific field. He cannot proceed without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday thinking.

The idea that “analyzing the nature of everyday thinking” is a “difficult problem” rather changes the meaning of the first line.

© 2017 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

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