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Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022

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Radio Condor Skiing

July 22, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Three words to start today. Skiing came to mind when I was listening to a discussion about the Andean Condor on the car radio the other day. The enthusiastic recommendation was to go see a Condor on your travels. The reason the Condor was being discussed was the recent publication of studies based on GPS tracking plus a motion sensor that counted the bird’s wing strokes. There’s a science alert you can read on this subject if you want more. Meantime, for me, the most interesting part is not that a condor flew for more than five hours without beating its wings once. Sure, it flew over 170 kilometres using nothing but air currents. I’m pretty sure this has been happening for millions of years. What I want to know if it ‘sees’ the thermals or relies on something else entirely?

Albatrosses fly huge distance too. Same kind of problem. Dovetail this with how both species manage to stay aloft and you have an interesting chance to find something new. New ways of seeing our world perhaps?

Volcanoes of food sustained my writing today.
[Read more…] about Radio Condor Skiing

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: albatross, altiplano, argentina, benedict evans, birds, bolivia, climate change, condor, photos, popular, saroche, substack, travel

1971

June 11, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘The world is too small for the kind of localism that leads to wars. We can have special pride in our country, our language, and our literature, our customs and culture and tradition, but it has to be the abstract pride we have in our baseball team or our college – a pride that cannot and must not be backed by force of arms.’

I read a ton of science fiction as a teenager and continued well into my twenties. My father seemed to be reading almost nothing else, though he also introduced me to Neville Shute and lots of WWII memoirs. SF was fully normalised in our home and I took years to understand how rare it was for households to be looking into possible futures. I am so grateful, with hindsight, that ‘what if’ was the mantra rather than ‘once upon a time’.

[Read more…] about 1971

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, climate change, david mcwilliams, david pimental, der spiegel, douglas adams, economics, irish times, john carey, pandemic, science fiction, tim flannery

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