Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The European Parliament has announced that the 2020 Sakharov Prize is going to the Belarusian opposition Coordination Council, a predominantly female group who are holding out for dignity and democracy. It’s surely a mark of the 26 year reign of the podpolkovnik (supreme commander) Alexander Lukashenko that this is the third time the prize has made its way to the troubled Belarus.
I had an apartment on the outskirts of London with a balcony that overlooked an office block and its ground level car park. More accurately, I could see the offices when proximal Whitebeam trees had shed their leaves. The office block and car park was empty for a few years until reopening under the flags of third level education. This was part of a British education initiative that delayed school leavers from entering the ranks of the unemployed while earning serious money from foreign students taking their studies in English.
There are a few stories in these journals about how technology changes with time (and space). Today, our TV breakfast news was headlined by the story of a collision of two black holes several billion years ago. A redefinition of the concept of a ‘late breaking’ story that we know about because of the sciences. The collision that was detected chirped for less than a tenth of a second on May 21st, 2019. It’s worth noting that mankind only invented the mechanism to record such news recently.
