Is growing up really necessary? If so, I hope one of my friends will tell me before it is too late.
Yesterday, I caught myself putting on my reading glasses to tie up the string on my yoyo…
Act your age
April 19th, 2016
Motherhood is a universal language
April 17th, 2016
David MacKay
April 14th, 2016
Very sad to learn that we have lost Prof Sir David MacKay today.
David was a good friend, but I only realised quite recently that we were almost exactly the same age, a fact which I found exceedingly humbling.
If I should be granted twice as many days, and achieve half as much, I would be very happy. And very surprised.
The world is poorer for his passing. But much richer for his having lived.
Pronto?
April 12th, 2016
The bus services that connect the little hill towns around here with the larger settlements on the Amalfi coast are quite remarkable. The bus drivers not only manage to squeeze their special, shortened buses through the sometimes tiny gaps on these small mountain roads with less than an inch separating them from the nearest wing mirror, but also to negotiate the tight hairpin bends without making the passengers feel sick. All the normal jokes about Italian driving don’t apply here. I have nothing but admiration for them. The ticket pricing is also pretty good.
But there’s a problem.
They’re too punctual.
We missed the bus back up the hill from Positano this evening: we arrived about 30 seconds late and so had to wait another hour. But we had also missed the one going down in the morning, when we arrived about two minutes early, to see the bus just departing about two-and-a-half minutes early. We didn’t want to wait for the next one, so we walked down by the steps. All 1700 of them.
What I want to know is, why can’t they be more like other southern-Europeans and take a more relaxed approach to timing? Me, I blame Mussolini…
Local residents
April 11th, 2016
I’ve seen dozens of these little chaps over the last few days, but few that have let me get as close as this.
After the rain
April 9th, 2016
The view from our balcony just now. And yes, it really did look like this…
The welcoming committee
April 7th, 2016
We’ve moved from a British coastline to an Italian one, for a few days.
In the words of Chris de Burgh…
April 5th, 2016
“There’s nothing quite like an out-of-season holiday town in the rain”
Hiking into the future
April 3rd, 2016
Today I realised there was yet another reason why I want a self-driving car.
It’s for when I’m walking.
The challenge with going for a good long walk in the country is often finding a nice circular route that will bring you back to where you parked the car.
But imagine you didn’t have to do that. Imagine that you could just walk from point A to point B and the car would be waiting for you when you arrived. You could then ride home in comfort, or, perhaps, enjoy lunch from the picnic hamper in the boot before setting off for the next reunion at point C. You could do this for days.
What’s even better is that you wouldn’t need to know your destination in advance! You could wander lonely as a cloud, floating o’er hill and dale, until you spied a welcoming tavern. While enjoying a pint of their finest ale, you would summon the car, and it would be parked outside by the time you wanted to leave. (And take you home, of course, if the ale had been particularly fine…)
An aerial view of the past
April 1st, 2016
Queens’ College in 1947, before the modern architects got their hands on it.
The Britain from Above website is fun to explore – you can search it for archive images.
Here are views of Cambridge, starting in the 1920s.
The new bicycle
March 28th, 2016
The lifeline?
March 28th, 2016
From Tim Urban’s wonderful site, Wait But Why, comes a discussion of Why Cryonics Makes Sense, in which he explains — in his usual light-hearted, cartoon-illustrated, occasionally-profane fashion — how he moved from thinking:
Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.
to actually signing up for an appointment with one of the big cryonics companies.
If you are of a religious persuasion and believe that your deity of choice is likely to provide a better chance of long-term survival than Alcor, Inc., then you’ll probably have dismissed cryonics out of hand, but the article may at least persuade you that cryonicists (your new word for today) are not complete nutters. They completely understand all the possible hiccups that might not allow you to be revived in the future, but think that the experiment — which is less costly than you might think — is worth undertaking. They view cryonics in much the same way that people in the past might have viewed organ transplants. An interesting read.
Wait But Why adopts an unusual format for these longer pieces, going into some depth on a subject to explain it for normal readers, yet doing so in an amusing way.
There are shorter, amusing posts on the site too — see How I handle long email delays, for example — but for the longer ones, if, like me, you seldom sit there twiddling your thumbs and thinking, “Where can I go to read 14,000 words on some random topic this morning?”, then I recommend signing up to get them in your inbox.
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