nobel prize

Inya and Offa

January 19, 2021 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

‘Write and tell us when we are going wrong’ said Aung Sang Suu Kyi at the end of her interview with Fergal Keane in 1995.

I wouldn’t know this but for walking along Offa’s Dyke for a few days in 2019. My walking buddy and I found ourselves in a bookshop in Hay-on-the-Wye where I picked up a used copy of Fergal Keane’s Letter to Daniel, published in 1996 for his new-born son. While I’ve enjoyed dipping into these stories over the last fifteen months, I realise that Daniel must be around 24 now and I wonder what he thinks of his Dad’s letters. And I wonder if Keane ever wrote to tell Daw Suu how they were going wrong.

Swe Dagon Pagoda, Rangoon 1992 © Simon Robinson

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Predictions and Divas

October 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

It’s nearly the end of October and Ireland is back in lockdown. Our 14 day averaged national infection rate has risen to over 300. Our island is divided and the north of the island is reported within the UK national rate which is over 400. But the daily rate of infection (per head) north of the border has been four times higher than that to the south. So I guess the contrast across that border should be a source of concern for health professionals. Yet, the island politics of peace agreements and an imminent divorce has implications for border patrols and isolationist if not exclusionist travel policies.

The global inconsistencies of healthcare reporting make it really hard for the lay observer to know what is happening both locally and at large. You’d have thought the opposite would be true after eight months of ‘concerted’ effort.

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Watching The Watchers

September 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘… there is as yet no consensus on why religion arose nor on why it has so tenaciously remained. And not for lack of ideas: coopting the naturally selected brain, driving group cohesion, calming existential anxiety, protecting reputations and reproductive opportunities’
― Brian Greene Until The End Of Time.

Does religion persist because it confers an adaptive advantage? Could it be that faith is a byproduct of the evolution of cognition? Could there be better things waiting for us in the future than we are experiencing now? Once you start asking questions like this, potential answers are legion.

This day 23 years ago, I was taking photos at Wings Over Houston.

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Coastal Fishing

September 17, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

Pity the fish.

Hemingway was long presumed to have exhausted his creativity when he produced a novella out of the blue, so to speak. The Old Man and the Sea was first published in just one edition of Life magazine which sold 5,300,000 copies in two days. And that’s today’s story, a tale of five million likes in just a few 1951 days and zillions more since. Not bad for a book the literary critics say is among Hemingway’s least significant works. Perhaps that became easier to say after he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature on account of books like The Old Man and the Sea.

While on the subject of pity and fishing, here are seven photos of fishing activities and the like around the coast here in South County Dublin.

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Brief Encounters: 2002

July 28, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

So, this is journal number 150 and I’m wondering if Siena is a nice place to visit. We’d have spent last night there and be walking down the last eleven days to Rome if not for the pandemic. Our plan had us continuing along the Via Francigena, reaching Ponte d’Arbia tonight where we’d planned to rest for our weekly day off. I think we’d have stayed a second night in Siena instead. I’ll try to remember this for next year, assuming waves of pandemic and panic won’t prevent us trekking from Manchester to Rome in 2021.

There’s a letter regarding life insurance on the counter this morning. It includes a Covid alert that seems strangely inappropriate on a renewal notice.

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Plenty of Times II

June 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma rays that hit our planet quite regularly. They can last for fractions of seconds or minutes. They can be detected from enormous cosmic distances.

Back in April 2010, a satellite detected a 10 second GRB burst. That’s ten seconds of gamma rays that we now know travelled 13 .7 billion years to reach us from a supernova in a galaxy that occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang.

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