• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom Completed
  • Chapbooks
  • Scarves

Fake Memoir

Volcanic Adventures

May 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Taranaki Spring 2011 © Simon Robinson

What does a photograph depict? What are your expectations? Tag this one with visible elements such as sky, blue, mountain, egmont, ridge, tree, norfolk pine, tower, clock, shops and categorise it by landscape, travel or urban. But if you knew more you might add the contexts of spring, dormant, opportunity or shopping. And if you lived in New Plymouth, you might discard it entirely knowing you had hundreds of better shots. Because if you lived there you’d have the knowledge and time to realise better opportunities.

[Read more…] about Volcanic Adventures

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: arctic, booklink, gns, new zealand, photography, photos, rugby, taranaki, travel, volcano, walking

Dream

May 1, 2020 by Simon Robinson 3 Comments

I had a couple of vivid dreams last night. Both of the dreams involved impossible workplace situations that sent me back in time to places that never existed. Some weird connections came to me as I awoke, those dream sequences having been extraordinarily real. I’d had enough of swimming in darkened crypts. Say no more.

Gus Always Bright
Gus Always Bright
[Read more…] about Dream

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: 3-sigma, bbc, booklink, ci lewis, clowns, dreams, dyno-nobel, earthquake, explosives, geophysics, julien meunier, jw de courcy, machine learning, mark henwick, monty python, nobel prize, pavillion cinema, popular, robert mallet, sahara, seg, seismic

Words

April 30, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I forgot the word sahel when I was writing From Memory. It’s the word that describes where I was in Niger. Tim Marshal reminded me that it comes from the Arabic word ‘sahil’ meaning coast. Shorelines are another of the things that depend on your perspective; the sea of Saharan sands has a southern coast. Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography is a great read for an armchair cartographer. Follow it along The New Silk Roads from Peter Frankopan to test if your current physical isolation is more or perhaps less constraining than an asymptomatic educational isolation. I’m not intending to be rude or patronising. Knowing you have limitations wakes you to the possibilities that your awareness of your limits is itself limited. Knowing of such limits may encourage you to explore for new concepts, seek the words to conjure and invoke and animate and debate them. Or cause you to distrust your perception.

[Read more…] about Words

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: doublets, graham greene, jackie morris, kenneth graham, liam c martin, niger, patrick leigh fermor, paula meehan, peter frankopan, photos, poetry, robert macfarlane, sahara, stylites, terence de vere white, tim marshall, word games

Non-obviousness

April 29, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I sat down to write about non-obviousness as a thought experiment. I’d cleared my desk of a litter of barely legible notes, making room for a Gedankenexperiment and a second cup of strong coffee. These notes were written in bed in the dark between 4 and 5 this morning. That’s a trick I learned from Lia though it’s taken me twenty years to put it into practice. 

Then my phone almost saved me from myself. I was contacted, though not tasked, to see if there were any giraffes in my study. A safari of this kind required I reload an enormous back-catalogue of photos into Lightroom which left me with time and coffee-energy to write up a non-obvious journal entry.

Giraffes found in my study from Masai Mara in Kenya and Fota Wildlife Park in Cork.
The lower Irish giraffe is a scarf idea for simonscarves at FabHappy
All photographs © Simon Robinson
[Read more…] about Non-obviousness

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: fota, judith butler, lightroom, masai mara, Maslow, oscar wilde, patents, photos, safari, ucd, ungrievable

OC and Disorder

April 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.’

This wasn’t originally an opening line. The idea for opening with it is from a 2011 fund-raising blog. I started every entry with the first line of a recently read novel. This was easy’ish’ because a novel a week was a great distraction from the inflections of geoscience projects and travel-induced jet lags. It was was a quiz-inspired fund-raising hook and I’d reveal the answer in a subsequent post. Interested readers might come back to learn, for example, that it was Hilary Mantel who opened Booker-winning Wolf Hall with ‘So now get up’. I had hoped, more importantly, that some might also contribute to a group fund-raising effort before a charity walk. They did contribute and most generously but not because of the quotations.

[Read more…] about OC and Disorder

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: Covid-19, hilary mantel, jung chang, mountains, photos, plague, tom moore, walking

Networth$

April 26, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

A 2017 Dalkey Book Festival talk I attended has lingered in memory. It was ostensibly about America, Russia and the new Cold War. It awoke something else in me. I was, at that time, professionally engaged in seeking geosicence applications for algorithms and machines that could learn. What I sought was time. I saw (and see) algos and ML as labour saving devices like the clothes- and dish- washers that continue to liberate people from drudgery. Freedom from repetitive, mind numbing tasks, creates the opportunity to pursue more rewarding things. And I sought to help my colleagues find unseen correlations, derive new insights and put their time to more creative uses. There wasn’t an easy answer to be had.

[Read more…] about Networth$

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: albert einstein, alec russell, algorithms, book festivals, dalkey book festival, david mcwilliams, davos, economics, financial times, hans rosling, irish times, jana bakunina, philanthropy, sandra navidi

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 53
  • Page 54
  • Page 55
  • Page 56
  • Page 57
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 59
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on 39
  • Lia Mills on Symbionts
  • Simon Robinson on immaterial WITNESS
  • Lia Mills on immaterial WITNESS
  • Ann Marie Hourihane on Flight from Rome

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021
  • Rome2023

Tags

albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 cycling dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular rome simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • 39
  • Symbionts
  • Éigse na Brídeoige 2023
  • Cook’s Book
  • immaterial WITNESS

Archives

  • June 2024 (1)
  • February 2024 (1)
  • January 2024 (1)
  • December 2023 (1)
  • November 2023 (1)
  • October 2023 (14)
  • September 2023 (20)
  • August 2023 (1)
  • July 2023 (1)
  • June 2023 (1)
  • May 2023 (1)
  • April 2023 (1)
  • March 2023 (1)
  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom Completed
  • Chapbooks
  • Scarves

Subscribe

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Copyright © 2025 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework