Posts filed under “Journal”
Against Censorship
SOPA & PIPA are the sort of Bullshit censorship models we can do without on the internet. That’s why I went dark on the 18th January and thankfully they were defeated this time. Have a read of some background to the well thought out arguments as why we need to oppose these types of measures [...]
The Kindle as the Endless book
So my first ebook reader a basic Kindle 4 came in the post just as the first Kindle fire was being launched in the States. I had been thinking of getting one for a while but with the recent revised lineup bringing a nice design simplification and price drop of the basic model I [...]
Schooling from two perspectives
A couple of links first about the Finnish School system in the Atlantic. The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do. Compare this with an article in the Guardian today US Schools with their own police. More and more US schools have police patrolling [...]
So long and thanks Christopher
Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. I happened on Hitchens slapping some inane point down, using almost verbatim the quote below. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of [...]
Paris Post-it Wars
Paris is in the grip of a post-it war: Hostilities were first engaged on the gleaming facades of Montreuil office park, east of Paris, home to gaming giant Ubisoft and BNP-Paribas bank’s IT systems. The conflict has since spread to the business district of La Défense, and to the equally besuited enclave of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which [...]
Finnish Wine
The most northerly wine in the world is produced in Olkiluoto in Finland1 with the help of nuclear powered waste water. But what I find more interesting is that Finland actually has a small network of farms making their own wine from Finnish berries (Blackcurrent, Blueberry, Whitecurrent, Cloudberry). Who’d have guessed that there is a [...]
Soulreasons
I have been helping my Dad set up his own blog. It’s called soulreasons. Drop by to read writings on consciousness and other phiosophical issues.
Summer Listings
So I’m about to go on holiday for a month and with about 30 half finished posts, 3 or 4 half read books at home and a partially updated website, this is all par for the course so I’m not going to worry about updating anything in particular (also par for the course). It might [...]
Finland Built Modern Libya
A nice article in HS about the Finnish construction industry in Libya through the 80′s which was as a market second only to Russia for them. There are lots of quotes here including a good one about having to remember about the different social and cultural structures they had to design for; The dwellings in [...]
Lacking Concept of Time or not
The Amondawa tribe in Amazon discovered in 1986 have no concept of abstract time according to a study from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil. We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time…Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences [...]
lewism page added
I just added a page to the website called Meta. It will be updated and expanded upon and links to pages or posts which contain information and resources which I cover here.
Finland in Stereo
Here are two links to I think very differing reports into the state of Finland now and its’ prospects for the future. They are both book size and I haven’t read them yet, but for now I’ll post about them with a quote from each preface and come back with a review of both a [...]
Bifurcation
Bivio a small town in Switzerland has just over two hundred inhabitants but the town speaks three languages, each in several different dialects. Because it is an isolated town most linguists believe it to be a relic of the multilinguistic norm in history. As today is world language day its a wonderful highlight of how [...]
Helsinki Infoshare
Helsinki region now has a website Helsinki Region Infoshare which is going to be a hub for publishing information about the city region over the next few years until I guess the cities and regions take this job over for themselves. Statistical information of all kind will be published here , so it should be [...]
Back to Finland
So I’m back at work and in Finland after a very long summer which took me and my family to Italy and Scotland. It was nice to arrive back after many weeks to the news that Finland is the best place in the world to live. These polls or surveys of best places like the [...]
Georss and kml
I always loved pointingit, although it seems to have gone the way of many websites into a kind of coma, and have for some time been geotagging any relevant posts I do here. But I just never was satisfied with a way of showing them that didn’t take an age to load or was just [...]