Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Science and experience both tell us that it may become harder to learn as we get older. On the grounds that it’s never too late to learn, I was thinking about science books overnight. Which is the best? Could it be The Selfish Gene? Or perhaps The Periodic Table? Maybe The Emperor of All Maladies? Or Factfulness?
So I thought a web search would help remind me of some that I have read. Where better to start than the annual Royal Society Prizes for Science Books?
Isn’t it ironic that my brain started making it’s own free associations at a time that social free association is proscribed?
It started again when there came a pier walk first thing this morning. And with that came a waft of stale urine from long closed public conveniences.
The story of K. This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic is an excellent informative read. Go to The Atlantic and read what Zeynep Tufekci had to say on September 30. And perhaps read her many other articles since the pandemic hit.
Imagine that it’s 11872 HE and a novel has just been published. This is a novel that future generations may consider as defining the expectations of the age.
HE is the Holocene era, a calendar formed by adding 10,000 to the widely used Common Era calendar CE. The Holocene Calendar is intended to mark the time elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution. This revolution is arguably a reasonable turning point in mankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to the sessile, settlement based lifestyles that forced us to cooperate for food production. The competitive and risky gathering practices had become outmoded. I presume that hunters and gatherers never imagined the value of their imaginings to the world but is that presumptuous of me?
The period after the Great War was, for Europe at least, a time of great insecurity. Governments and gangsters both struggled to maintain order.
‘What good is a newborn baby?’ asked Benjamin Franklin in 1783 when people questioned his enthusiasm for the recent invention of hot air ballooning. His predictions that the balloons would become significant for transport was unusually wrong. 250 years later, Loon is a balloon system in the news for delivering the internet in Kenya and elsewhere. Balloons are helping transport information.
