I don’t know who needs to hear this, but living your life to the fullest does not have to involve hiking.
Good writing skill cultivates a discipline of thinking. Thoughts cease to be random and chaotic. They gradually become systematic and structured instead.
Having journaled for years, I’m tempted to agree. Writing thoughts out allow opportunities for dissection and I end up knowing more about myself, which is helpful in arenas such as career, relationships etc.
Power
This site shows the UK’s power generation breakdown. At the time of writing, our 30GW demand is created by natural gas (55%), nuclear (20%), wind (11%) and other (14%). Sustainable and clean energy, for all the PR I see, isn’t quite the player I thought it’d be by now.
Though we sometimes focus on the carbon intensity of electricity, what I think might matter more, is the amount of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere from power generation. 2019 emissions from energy supply was 65.5% lower than they were in 1990.
Source: Department of Energy
Energy itself isn’t evil. It’s necessary…to create food, pump water, generate warmth, charge your phone, play Netflix. Energy security isn’t inherently bad. Sustainable methods are better for many reasons, but its current capacity can’t provide all our energy needs. Much work needs to be done to build out the infrastructure.
Circle me like I am your sun
and I will make a world out of you
I grew up in Central London. Although my travels took me far and wide: The Canadian Lakes, Chernobyl, Tianjin, Eldoret etc., I love living in Central London…
…but I’ve also just escorted a pigeon off the metropolitan line.
Back at It Again With the White Vans
Since I’m getting back into skateboarding, I had to grab a pair of flat shoes to practise with. The store assistant eagerly helped me out and gave me some pointers. It’s amazing how people light up when you have something in common. He told me his hero was Rodney Mullen…
Giant bamboo, which can grow up to 151 feet tall, is the largest variety of grass.
January
The passage of time
is a smooth loop
of circles around the sun –
a ‘year’ has no natural edge
so can’t be ‘new’ or ‘old’
in any truthful sense –
these numbers we add up
are merely markers
of how long we’ve been counting.
But as winter catches our breath
it seems good to return to old rituals
so I pause and observe:
what is shifting inside
as we spin on this orbit?
what marks have been left
by recent joy and sorrow?
where will my heart lead me
if I let it?
Richard Watkins (2019) Alive or Else. Simply This Publishing
Ideology
An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.
But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for an individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, some kind of personal organising system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act.
Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.
Kim Stanley Robinson (2021) Ministry For The Future. S.L.: Orbit.
You ever wonder how trillions of living cells and organisms make up a human being and that we’re not an entity in isolation – and that maybe we are one of the trillions of cells and organisms making up earth, meaning earth is a living thing. If this is so – why do humans make themselves the centre of the universe?