mercoledì, settembre 30, 2009

The trough behind the wave

My brain is nearly broken today. Too much stress but good prospects of it easing off, and a trip to Germany planned for the weekend. With more kayaking. Yay! That will make five countries I've kayaked in. Not bad for someone who hardly knows how to fucking kayak. Next summer I'm going to treat myself to some real coursework with rolls and rapids and things like that. For now it's just the pretty.

Reading The Economic Decline of Empires. You know, for fun. I've only read the first one about the late Roman empire and I'm close to following my advice to Sam - chucking my household into a car and driving away like a madwoman, because it's open season for the rich! So us.

This came in the mail yesterday. I have to start paying more attention to TED.

4 commenti:

Baywatch ha detto...

TED is wicked great.

fyi, we have a nice inland sea here with easy kayak rentals, next time yr in our hood, maybe for the olympics?

Dread Pirate Jessica ha detto...

Maybe I'll come kayak while I'm giving the Vancouver Olympics a miss.

Unknown ha detto...

I watch a lot of TED and it's entertaining (which is worth something) but I'm often frustrated that the science talks contain so little content. They're like teasers and sometimes they just make me grumpy when I can't find out more online. And everything is so grand and self-important about TED in general that that puts me off. I guess it's hard to be inspirational without being pretentious. And some talks are downright BAD. It particularly irks me when they don't justify conclusions they draw from numerical data (which is common).

But there are some really great talks too, so I keep coming back.

Speaking of giving the Vancouver Olympics a miss, we're going to do that too. Which south-east asian country should we escape to?

Dread Pirate Jessica ha detto...

That was the first one I watched though I've seen TEDdy things all over the place.

I got the question wrong too, by the way, but spectacularly wrong. Or as spectacularly wrong as you can get when you've only got three choices. I guess I imagined things repeating were more likely than things not repeating. That sort of FLAWLESS, almost Nietzchean logic is probably why I need to pay more attention to TED.

I won't have moved close to south-east Asia during the Vancouver Olympics. Why don't you escape to here instead? Brussels is no fucking idyllic Thai beach but it's pretty wet nonetheless. Or we can all go kayaking on Lake Michigan. In February. That would be awesome, or we'd all die.