There are astronomical reasons for the day to be a day, there are astronomical reasons for the year to be a year, but there are no astronomical reasons for the week to be a week. My father, Carlos Manuel Varsavsky, who was an astronomer, knew this well.

So my father thought of another week. A better week. A week that lasts 6 days. A week in which you work for 4 days and rest two and yet the country’s GDP stays the same.

How? Well stop reading now and see if you get it.

Did you think that we could work 10 hours per day instead of 8?

No, that’s not it. My father, who unfortunately passed away in 1983 at the young age of 49, had a better idea. But a bit more complex.

The solution to how to get everyone to work one day less, and for GDP to stay the same, has to do with not everyone working and resting at the same time as we do now. Currently we have a system of a 7 day week in which most of us work 5 days and rest 2 and work 40 hours. My father’s idea consists in randomly splitting the population in three groups, let’s call them Red, Blue and White groups to make the French and the Americans happy. Once people are randomly distributed (everyone in the same family gets the same week), then each group is ready to work and rest but not simultaneously. Society would have one third of the people who follow the red week, another third the blue week and the last third the white week. Everyday there would be two groups working and one resting, rotating.

Why does GDP stay the same? Because all the fixed investment of society gets used every day. Every school, factory, office building, road, everything that we invested trillions in building would be used every day, the thing is, not by the same people.

There is also a 9 day week possibility to this idea. Work 6 but every weekend is 3 days long. Not bad.

My friends Pablo and Rosa Oks of Argentina asked Chilean architect Mathias Klotz to design a home for them in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay. The result is stunning. It is a three bedroom home facing the Atlantic Ocean. Jose Ignacio is a small village in Uruguay near the mostly environmentally destroyed Punta del Este. Even though the famous Chilean architect gets most of the credit, I think that Pablo and Rosa deserve a significant part of it. Pablo is an instinctual decorator and Rosa is a great landscape artist who also did my garden.

I started studying photography. I am on my 4th lesson. Photography is something that we all do, but few know about. I don’t know why it took me so long to take a serious interest in it. With a few lessons your pictures start getting much better.

For those of us who get to travel a lot, photography and video are two amazing tools for sharing our lives. There are no words that could communicate our walk with Nina around Jose Ignacio during a storm as these pictures do.

In the afternoon we went to La Pedrera, another town.

I once heard Tony Blair talk about Global Warming in the midst of a snow blizzard in Davos. He was having a real hard time making his case and at one point he did remark that it was a paradox to make the case to prevent warming in freezing conditions. We would have all preferred being in the Caribbean. Fast forward 5 years to the Caribbean – last weekend to be precise. Again we are talking about global warming during an unusually cold day in Saint Barths, this time with Nathan Myhrvold, ex CTO of Microsoft and one of the smartest scientists/inventors on the planet. We were having a Christmas dinner with my wife and his wife and kids and the subject of global warming came up again. The conversation was inspired by the fact that Nathan’s firm, Intellectual Ventures, has a proposed solution for global warming called Stratoshield that I found fascinating. But the challenge for me to communicate this idea to you is that as smart as Nathan is, marketing is not his forte and I did not find a simple description of the project. So I will do my best to explain it.

If you want to start by Nathan’s sources however, you can watch this video in which he does explain the Stratoshield concept to Fareed Zakaria. But it is long, complicated and the road that takes you to learn about Nathan’s proposed solution to global warming is winding and passes by such random topics as how fast penguins poo (it turns out that they poo very fast). You can also read this article and watch a very well made animation. If you prefer to stay on this article here’s my short version of Stratoshield.

Human beings have enormous behavioral inertia. Once we start doing something it is hard for us to change. And we are addicted to carbon based fuels. It will be very difficult to ask humanity to kick the CO2 habit in the near term. Moreover CO2 stays for thousands of years and we have sent up an incredible amount of the stuff. So while we try as much as we can to cut future emissions it is very likely that we will fail to do so quickly enough. So what can we do to prevent global warming? Learn from volcanoes. It turns out that volcano eruptions cool the earth significantly. And they cool it because they emit sulfur dioxide which act by creating blocking some of the sun’s energy at the stratosphere and preventing it from getting to the surface of the earth. Small quantities of sulfur dioxide, like small quantities of Ozone for example, have huge effects on climate. So what’s the solution, to wait for a volcano to erupt? Well we could but volcano eruptions are highly unpredictable. So the next best solution is to emulate a volcano. Stratoshield: two 25km garden size hoses near each pole flying into the stratosphere held by V shaped balloons that pump sulfur dioxide up from the earth providing shade for all of us.

How much would it cost to test this solution? Less than $100 million dollars. And, implementing it costs less than what USA spends on defense in one day.

Ok, so what is the bad news? Unfortunately, Nathan is not getting enough key people in the States to back his solution. Environmental activists, Al Gore types, believe that his plan would be seen as a license to emit and it is better not to even try.

My recommendation to Nathan was to go for a very different angle. Instead of promoting his concept inside USA , go outside and make the case to OPEC, specifically to the Saudis. Why would OPEC or the Saudis spend say $50 million to test this idea? Because OPEC countries have two enormous incentives to see this succeed. One is to continue selling oil but another one is that OPEC countries tend to be extremely hot countries already who can do with the little extra shade that the sulfur dioxide would provide from the stratosphere. Nathan appreciated this advice and I would not be surprised if Intellectual Ventures tries to approach the Saudi Government. I hope they do.

Now what do I think about the sulfur dioxide pump solution to global warming? It’s complicated. After visiting China and being unable to breathe well because of the pollution, I believe that there are other more urgent reasons, like global health, than global warming to cut emissions. Clean air is not only beautiful, crisp, but it is also much healthier. So I believe we should go for both. Do everything we can to cut emissions, but also try Nathan’s solution out as an emergency plan B. As Nathan says, his solution is like a bypass. You may ask the whole world to avoid cholesterol but few do, and in the end, many get a bypass or stent surgery. Nathan’s solution to global warming is one very long stent!

I finish with a picture of Nathan’s Yacht, the Teleost, and my sailboat, Aphrodite. In my carbon defense, I would like to mention that my sailboat just crossed the Atlantic from Barcelona to Barbados and then on to Saint Barths. With us on board, and in spite as weighing as much as 75 cars, it spent the fuel of one car doing those 4500nm because it goes by wind power. Fuel is used for the generator. Nathan’s boat on the other hand, as you can see, is a motor boat and does consume enormous amounts of fuel. But in Nathan’s defense, I can say that if his idea works, we should all give him enough lifetime carbon credits to use Teleost guilt free!

Yesterday, Nina and I went from Saint Martin to Miami. As a result of the foiled terrorist attack we were subject to two screenings. One was the already extensive screening that US airports do, shoes off and all. But after that, we went through another painful passenger by passenger screening that resulted in a 90 minute flight delay. Every passenger was searched an average of two minutes by two security people divided into male and female passengers. This included intense searches of passengers in wheel chairs and people of all ages, included very elderly passengers.

As I observed this process, I could not stop thinking that there must be a better and faster way of dealing with periods of high alert like the one we are going through now right in the middle of the holiday season. So this what came to mind.

I would leave the first screening as it is but I would change the second screening. Before you go on reading, please remember that until yesterday I had never encountered a second screening. If there is going to be a 90 minute long second screening process, here is a better alternative. It is what I call P2P passenger to passenger airline screening.

The plan would be that in the waiting area, before boarding, with all passengers there, airline personnel organize 20 groups of 10 passengers each. It is important that the assignment be done randomly by airline employees. One way would be to use seat assignments. After the groups are formed, two leaders would be chosen in each group based on the passengers with the most miles. Then in each group passengers would introduce each other and leaders would ask whatever questions they find reasonable in order to conclude if the members of her/his group are safe to fly with. If they see anything out of the ordinary they would refer the passenger to security for further questioning.

Why P2P?

-passengers have skin in the game. Security personnel stays on the ground.

-it is much faster. 2 people screen 200 passengers for 2 minutes each in 200 minutes. This process should not take more than 15 minutes, possibly 5.

– this is on top of current security, it is one more layer of security.

-many terrorist attacks are stopped by fellow passengers.

-with all respect to the privately hired security forces that screen passengers around airports, it is likely that the average well traveled passenger is smarter than the average newly hired private security employee.

-as opposed to Israeli screening methods which are considered best in the world and involve extensive, random interviewing, current security does not involve conversations. It is through conversation and normal human interaction that a person who is about to blow up a plane, with whatever method, may be discovered.

The P2P screening idea is one of those projects like Wikipedia, that believes that collective intelligence is greater than individual intelligence. Two experienced travelers leading a group of 10 other travelers in a 10 minute session can uncover anomalies that were not picked up during screening oriented towards finding explosives that are so hard to track. And in any case, this is an idea that deserves much further thinking and redesign before trialing it. One good group to ask to would be imprisoned terrorists. The question would be simple. If you had to go through physical searches alone or to both physical searches and questioning by an experienced airline traveler what would you worry about more? I tend to think that terrorists, like anyone, would fear the unpredictability of the P2P system.

To end the post with a positive note, this 90 minute delay was nothing compared to the amazing time we had during our honeymoon.

Here are some pictures.