Bill Murray's Blog, page 85
June 6, 2017
Quotes:
“… we dont know how it is that we manage to talk. If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.
Cormac McCarthy: The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from? at Nautilus.com
June 5, 2017
June 3, 2017
Out in the Cold: Audiobook Excerpt
Here is another excerpt from my latest book, Out in the Cold: Adventures in Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Canada. The audiobook version is running ahead of schedule and should be available on Audible.com in the next couple of weeks. This clip is from Part 2, The Faroe Islands, a small and gorgeous archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean. In the Faroes, they’re not used to high crimes, and the last time a murder happened it mesmerized the islands. It’s me speaking; I narrate the book. I hope you enjoy it.
https://commonsenseandwhiskey.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/murderinthefaroes.mp3
Until the audiobook version is available, you can buy the written version of Out in the Cold on Amazon, here, or you can get the audiobook versions of either of my other books here:
Common Sense and Whiskey on Audible.
Visiting Chernobyl on Audible.
And here are several more written excerpts from Out in the Cold.
June 2, 2017
Excellent Energy Strategies for Our Future
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“and I happen to love the coal miners”
– President Donald Trump in his speech repudiating the Paris accords.
Nobody wants their industry disrupted – coal miners, anybody. To their great good fortune, the miners’ prominent backer Mr. Trump seems smitten by their support in his election campaign.
Yet big picture, let’s see if we want to upset the international apple cart. From the Washington Post:
There are various estimates of coal-sector employment, but according to the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns program, which allows for detailed comparisons with many other industries, the coal industry employed 76,572 people in 2014, the latest year for which data is available. That number includes not just miners but also office workers, sales staff and all of the other individuals who work at coal-mining companies.
By comparison, Mickey Mouse employed more than twice that in 2016. Walt Disney corporate employees: 195,000. From the same WP article, the bowling industry employed 69,088. Coal mining employed fewer workers than Arby’s (close to 80,000), Dollar General (105,000) or the failing retailer J.C. Penney (114,000).
Meanwhile, Forbes says:
“more people were employed in solar power last year than in generating electricity through coal, gas and oil energy combined,” at just under 374,000 people.
Coal mining, 76,572 and fading. Solar, 374,000 and growing.
Our president swaggers, defying international cooperation, most current scientific thought and, in these employment numbers, basic logic, for an apparent political purpose that has something to do with setting a firm jaw, driving wedges, and defining the prior consensus as evil.
To what end? Anyone?
Weekend Reading
A few titles for your weekend perusal:
Dark Tourism in Kazakhstan’s Gulag Heartland by Peter Ford at thediplomat.com
Malta Leaks: Playing the Shell Game in the Mediterranean at Spiegel Online
Moldova Between Russia and the West: A Delicate Balance by Eugene Rumer at carnegieendowment.org
The energy expansions of evolution by Olivia P. Judson at nature.com
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb by Joshua Sokol in Quanta Magazine
How to Be a Stoic by Skye Cleary in 3ammagazine
Friday Photo Quiz #7
The answer to last week’s quiz: It was the Mediterranean island nation of Malta.
On to this week’s quiz. Here is the skyline of this country’s second city. Neither the main city nor this one is the country’s capital. Can you name the city? The country?
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Leave your best guess as a comment. I’ll put all the correct answers into a hat, draw one, and the winner of the drawing gets a copy of the audiobook version of my book Common Sense and Whiskey. It appears the winner must be in the USA for the Audible.com download code to work.
Win free stuff every Friday this summer. New photo every Friday, drawing the next Thursday, winner notified by email Friday. Good luck.
Now: What’s your guess in this week’s quiz?
June 1, 2017
Quotes:
On the future of work, from Scottish Review:
“If the supply of ‘meaningful jobs’ does indeed start drying up because of increased automation, it will raise broader societal questions. In India and Scandinavia there’s already active discussion of moving to a guaranteed minimum income as a redistributive mechanism, but that alone won’t address the issue of the dignity of work, hence the attraction of a demagogue who promises to bring back ‘real jobs’. If those jobs don’t appear organically, we could find ourselves back to something that looks like Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. Not just a guaranteed income, but a guaranteed job to go with it, and the promise of doing something worthwhile, rather than just being a benefits scrounger.”
May 29, 2017
Polar Bear Visits Campers’ Tent
“Ronny Lauritz Berntsen thought a reindeer was pushing against the outside wall of the tent so he smacked the fabric hoping to scare it away. Then he realized that might not have been a great idea.”
Read more from IcePeople.
May 28, 2017
Quotes:
The universe is lazy. People are lazy. From Farnam Street:
“Physicists use Occam’s razor, in the knowledge that they can rely on everything to use the minimum energy necessary to function. A ball at the top of a hill will roll down in order to be at the point of minimum potential energy. The same principle is present in biology. For example, if a person repeats the same action on a regular basis in response to the same cue and reward, it will become a habit as the corresponding neural pathway is formed. From then on, their brain will use less energy to complete the same action.”
