I'm off for the next two weeks. I had lined up a hundred chimps, each with their own laptop, in the hope that they could continue blogging on my behalf during my absence. The results during testing have been disappointing I'm afraid. One of them clearly did not understand the difference between cost-push and demand-pull inflation, while another spelt heteroskedasticity incorrectly. The others were even more useless.*
By the way, you may know that my blog's name is a reference to the oft quoted idea that a chimpanzee throwing darts at a list of investments would beat the majority of investors selecting from the same list. It has amused me that many who write about this allegory require the chimp to be blindfolded...
I am going to Iceland. And for the first time. Iceland is part of the longest and tallest mountain range on the planet, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a so-called spreading centre. The American and the African/Eurasian tectonic plates are being pulled apart as plates thousands of miles away around the Pacific are sucked back into the earth. Volcanic activity along the "gash" in the Atlantic causes huge mountains to form. This mountain range mostly remains underwater because it is heavy and oceanic crust is thin. However, underneath Iceland sits a mantle plume, a cylinder of partly molten material welling up from deep in the Earth's mantle. The plume has pushed up a little chunk of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge above sea level which we call...Iceland.
Plumes exist elsewhere - underneath Hawaii and the Canaries for example - but Iceland is a cut above the rest (my first geology joke, perhaps it should be my last).
* I first heard this and Bob Newhart's other sketches on a casette tape in my parents' car when we drove around on holiday. It is (still) very funny.
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