Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
I’ve used metaphors throughout my life to illustrate how things work. I’ve come to realise that may be because the use of the metaphor helps me understand why we do the things we do. As Simon Sinek said ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’
When I was 59, an office based geoscientist, I had a BMI of about 24. I liked to maintain my fitness by long distance hill walking (though not fell running). I enjoyed good food and didn’t smoke or drink alcohol. So I was surprised when my PSA was found to have jumped to 9.7 in the sixteen months between two blood tests.
Yeasts as carbon dioxide strippers. What a concept! Suddenly you are thinking of National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich or the Center for Bread Flavour outside Brussels? Wrong countries. I’m thinking of Austria. But first, we’ll need to go to the UAE, Oman and Cyprus where you might be able to see rocks soaking up CO2.
It seems I was wrong about how sunflowers transport their water to the tip of the plant. I have just read that science doesn’t really know how a tree transports water from the soil to the crowns of trees. Ask yourself the simple question I forgot to ask: how does the world famous redwood called Hyperion get water to its crown 115 m above the ground? It must be properly hydrated given that it’s over 900 years old.
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?
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?
