At the Stockholm Toy Museum
- Read an interesting view of the increasingly bold covid lockdown protests in China. Dangerous to participate. Have these people forgotten about the Tiananmen Massacre? Actually they probably have. Because of Party censorship, that event is little known as a deterrent.
- In its annual stat dump, Spotify tells me that I like rock, neo-psychedelia, indie rock, psychedelic doom (a.k.a. stoner rock) and alternative rock. A big change in my listening behaviour with the arrival of streaming services was that I abandoned albums altogether. There are lots of bands where I love three songs and I have no idea what else they’ve done.
- Found a copy of Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the train home from Lecco. Excellent paper, like onion skin.
- Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods (1998) describes pre-GPS hiking. He’s super angry with the inadequate official paper maps of the Appalachian Trail. President Clinton opened GPS to the public in 2000.
- Annoying boardgame design feature: when you gain new complicated individual abilities through the game, and you forget to use them.
- If on an empty highway at night you engage cruise control on your Tesla and fall asleep, then the car will zig zag lazily mile after mile, automatically avoiding the barriers, neatly blinking its indicators each time it changes direction. You may wake up on an off ramp that the car happens to enter. Or just travel on.
- People with a historical perspective tend to assume that if you follow the written sources back to the earliest ones, you encounter the Original State of Humanity. I find it fascinating that before written history, there’s actually hundreds of thousands of years of kaleidoscopic cultural change before you get back to the H. sapiens speciation event.
- Somebody should write a study of American musicians’ attempted name changes.
- There is no breathable air inside the Orion capsule during the début flight, only nitrogen.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
“Have these people forgotten about the Tiananmen Massacre? Actually they probably have. ”
Also, it was in 1989. 30 years ago, one generation and half? For the youngest, it’s going into legend status.
Most of the Chinese Phd/post-doc colleagues I met during my career were born around or after that period.
Speaking of Tiananmen and time’s flying, have a look at the video from the French group Indochine, about the song “Nos Celebrations”. The group has been around for 40 years and they made a cartoon to summarize all that went past. A bit French-centered, obviously, but you will recognize many of the events. Some good souvenirs, some sad ones.
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That’s a blast from the past! I remember their song “Kao-Bang”.
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“… before you get back to the H. sapiens speciation event.”
I hope they celebrated it with a great party.
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“30 years ago, one generation and half?” – No, you are miles off. The length of a generation has varied through time, but it has varied between 25 and 30 years.
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Bryson is a babe in the woods, he would be angry with GPS too I think.. the problem isn’t in the maps he was using 😉 but in the map reader.
As we say in the tech support business, problem is between chair and keyboard..
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He doesn’t hate all the maps, making a clear distinction between good and bad ones.
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Jeez If I only had saved the many space-related toys I had from the late sixties-early seventies. They would have fetched $$$.
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