Today will go down in history for this bit of news: cancer vaccine advances to clinical Stage 1 trials. It may not be this one that works for everyone, and it may not be a vaccine that will be used long into the future, but it’s a major step. As pointed out by cperciva on [...]

A New Year is usually the time that forces you to stop and think about what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, and what you want to do. I chose to put more work into things that matter, and less into things that don’t matter. I chose to drop quite a few things altogether. I’ve [...]

I just posted this idea on Hacker News. Let’s see if there’s any interest (my karma is pretty low, I don’t think it gets seen by a lot of people…). Here’s the post:

Summary:
* Crowdfunding for GPL/Creative Commons projects
* Free service, non-profit entity
* Technical help needed

Sparked by the copyright discussion on thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3303796 I thought we [...]

I’m seeing lots of startups these days. Startups at events, pitches in emails, even pitches over SMS at 00:15 on Friday night (yeah – not recommended).
There are good ones in there, always, but I’d like to air a personal opinion. Almost always the ideas are small. Even if there’s the ambition level to create a [...]

I have read lots of productivity tips from Lifehacker and many good blogs. I think a lot of the self-management tools and processes are great if you have a clear-cut work, and then clear-cut distraction that you want to minimize. But what if your work is those distractions?
If you are a marketing or biz dev [...]

9 days left, 30% of the funding for the Seal of Saimaa documentary completed. We are reaching out much more in the last week so I hope we will still make the target. The documentary will happen even if we do not reach the goal, so every donation and pledge will go to the right [...]

At the end of time, there are no more stories. While there is only history, stories lose their meaning. Stories are told for the future, often in the context of the past in order to be understood, but always for the future. If there were only a handful of minutes left, what story would be [...]

I just had a quick read through of the Startup Genome report. The ambition level and aims of the team are commendable. But I was disappointed by the substance. I would like to make it clear that I respect the endeavour immensely and would certainly like to see a more robust reporting of the findings. [...]

I just had a quick read through of the Startup Genome report. The ambition level and aims of the team are commendable. But I was disappointed by the substance. I would like to make it clear that I respect the endeavour immensely and would certainly like to see a more robust reporting of the findings. [...]

This blog post was originally posted at the HackFwd Blog.
With the release of The Telegraph’s European Start-Up 100, Europe gets another benchmark for tech companies that are looking to break it big. From our perspective, the list mostly features companies quite far into their startup life, but it provides an interesting perspective into what the [...]

This blog post was originally posted at the HackFwd Blog.
With the release of The Telegraph’s European Start-Up 100, Europe gets another benchmark for tech companies that are looking to break it big. From our perspective, the list mostly features companies quite far into their startup life, but it provides an interesting perspective into what the [...]

I bought, downloaded and read the e-book Homo Evolutis right after the last TED conference, where the book was launched. I have a couple of major problems with it. One is the logic of the argument. The second is the presentation of the book. Luckily, it was cheap. And short.
Juan Enriquez & Steve Gullans, “two [...]

You may want to know all of this stuff, but it will be much faster to concentrate on testing what works.
Image by aprilzosia via Flickr

We learn from UX and design experts that products must be user-centric. Thereby, we go out and do extensive qualitative research with the potential users. We interview them, ask them questions [...]

Image via Wikipedia

Iteration is an indispensable term and principle in software development and increasingly other project management. While the concept may be clear, a definition of terms should be useful. Here is how I think about it. An iteration is a version of a product or a project that best meets the currently known (prioritized) [...]

(Image by Annie Mole via Flickr)

On a British train, a large red sticker on the door of the First Class carriage reads: “WELCOME TO FIRST CLASS. Passengers in this compartment without a First Class ticket could be prosecuted or issued a penalty fare.” In this brief bright sticker the non-complying passenger is given a warning [...]

I’ve seen a few start-up roadmaps and business plans in the last few years.  In addition to the hockey-stick revenue curve, valley-of-death-ask and a few other staples, there is the staffing plan. This is where start-ups should be very careful, since this is where the money goes. They also need to be careful, because the [...]

Today, Helsingin Sanomat posted an editorial with the title “Sarjayrittäjyys on pantava kuriin” – or “Serial entrepreneurship must be curbed”, for a proximate but in-spirit translation.
It is almost needless to say how damaging this attitude is. For the largest paper in Finland to only not know what serial entrepreneurship is, but to recklessly mischaracterise an [...]

Today, a new news site launched in Finland. Called Topiikki (www.topiikki.fi), the service is a bit like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast (both excellent, innovative services) in its news curation. Topiikki sources the best-written and most insightful news items about the most important daily news and links to them. Topiikki for example gathers the [...]

(Image via Wikipedia)

A book called “Wake Up, You’re A Liberal” that I browsed once at the airport years ago had a line: “If we would all be conservatives, we would still be living in caves.” I think that’s funny, and true. Conservatism is by definition a traditional view of the world, which contains a mechanism [...]

I’m looking forwards to reading some non-academic philosophy for a change. Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work will probably be as light a snack as his previous books have been, by which I don’t mean to offend: popularising philosophy is a worthy task and de Botton does it as good as anyone.
With [...]

(Image by AJC1 via Flickr)

In last week’s Twitter newsletter, Biz Stone tells us that they recently hired their 140th employee. Well done. In hypergrowth, that’s a short jump to 150, often quoted as the Dunbar number of social relations. The theory behind the value states that based on our brain size, we can maintain a [...]

(Image via Wikipedia)

Jerry Fodor, with his co-author Piattelli-Palmarini, wrote an article in the New Scientist to pre-defend their new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Here is a comment I composed and posted on the NS site after reading the article:
This sounds like it’s all quite wrong. I can only imagine arriving at such conclusions [...]

I am in the process of moving my blog. Let’s see how much I can break in along the way.

Terry Pratchett’s lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in London was shown on BBC One last night, and is still available here (though you may have to be in the UK to view). Sir Terry’s talk – which he couldn’t deliver himself for the most part due to his early-onset Alzheimer’s – was mainly [...]

1) Witty, funny or obscure (mostly the latter in my case) sayings or thoughts.2) Drawings made with a one single line without lifting the pen from the paper (and occasionally following other rules such as no crossing, or loops only, etc.)

“We will need morality as long as we continue to misunderstand ourselves.”

“Let me look [...]

from artrepublic
Some links on shopping:British consumers spent a total of £33 million online during the Monday lunch hour and £1.4 million was spent at 13:43 alone, making it the busiest online shopping minute ever. http://tinyurl.com/yckcbvb
More than two thirds of UK shoppers (70%) plan to spend an average of £220 of their Christmas shopping budget online. [...]

Who would’ve thought a couple of years ago? With bells and whistles abound on high-traffic sites the world around, good old Google stayed true to the perfectly static search homepage. Remembering the adventures we had with simple one-liners shorter than your average tweets, an animated effect on the homepage would’ve been unheard of.
Official Google Blog: [...]

Here is an interesting example of how Google’s search suggestions can wreak havoc on your brand message – without you having any control over it, really. The examples in the case are in Finnish, but they are translated.
Nordea is the largest bank in the Nordics, and in Finland their catchphrase for many products such as [...]

This weekend in London the annual Affordable Art Fair takes place in Battersea Park. The affordable bit in the name simply means that all pieces are under £3,000. I had a thorough browse through today, picked up a beautiful etching by Jo Riddell, and was quite enlightened. Especially the recent graduates area of the exhibition [...]

District 9 – an incredible, intelligent, multilayered story – is the movie of the year.
I’ll quickly concentrate on a layer that I’ve thought quite an interesting angle into an inquiry into ethics – and if this is not too sci-fi, would like to explore this academically at some point, at least on a level of [...]

First of all: apologies to Pingstate.nu. They’re a wonderful community and I actually wish them all the best.
The ridiculousness of Twitter continues to amaze me. It is a reasonable news filter for personal areas of interest, I’ll give it that much. But there must be better ways to filter news based on identity. See, Twitter [...]

Saw this pointed out by Sami and had to post myself since I’ll want to watch this over and over again. Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field is the most incredibly imaging development in the history unti l now, and YouTube’s HD is almost as unparalleled.

Watch in HD and full screen and see what I mean.

A long side project has finally seen the light of day – the Prize Pony store is open and churning orders (hopefully at some point ) at www.prizepony.com. The long story of how things happened is on the Prize Pony blog.
Any and all feedback massively appreciated!
 

I have found that the user experience with Google has deteriorated over the past two years. In the past couple of months, it has worsened considerably.
First, Google started introducing more and more aggressive spell-checking and correction in the queries. Often, especially with obscure languages like Finnish, Google decides to correct the query, even if the [...]

While we in Finland managed to motivate ourselves to break the 40% mark in the EU elections of 2004 (41.1%), we are seeing possibly the worst, most uninspiring and obscure candidate line-up in the history of the elections. The best-known candidate even says he’ll only stay in Strassbourg for a maximum of two years (Soini’s [...]

The kitewing is probably the most fun toy I’ve had in a long time. I got a Rage 55 – wingspan 5,5 meters – earlier this year and have had a few good runs both on the Espoo/Helsinki coast and Lake Saimaa in Lappeenranta at my dad’s house. The below video from my second time [...]

Teppo, a friend of mine, has gotten a creative and exciting venture nicely started. Called Cityvice.tv, the site will offer high-quality video content for syndication partners based on various custom channels. I love video so I wanted to help out, and this far I’ve done a few interviews you can see below. More to come, [...]

Despite being high on painkillers and muscle relaxants, I went to Nosturi to do a quick interview with Jussi Lehtisalo from Circle. I would’ve gone even if my legs were cut off. The interview was done for my friend Teppo’s CityVice.tv, which seems to be picking up nicely. I think he liked my style, so [...]

I'm on some pretty groovy painkillers right now and this comes from the tender care of Maria Hospital in Helsinki. Having come back from skiing, I went to the gym even though my back wasn't cooperating and got totalled in the early sets of my squat (only 80 kg on the bar, [...]

This should be a joke, but it doesn’t seem to be. The bigger the advertising account is, the more shit you can push. Yes, it’s about the Pepsi rebranding. Maybe the whole rebranding travesty is a viral campaign in itself and I’m just another fool pushing it, but here goes.
From Reddit:
During the initial treatment, the [...]

Finally, the book is out. It went through an unintentional rewrite after a classic hard-drive failure, and a coffee spill on a couple of maps drawn earlier. But now it’s out. Take a look below – there’s a limited preview there as well.

Here’s what I wrote in the description:
A chronological personal account of a journey [...]

An email this morning on a pending job:
We know how important your data is to you but Unfortunetely, and on this occassion, your data is Unrecoverable.This is due to the Severe head crash of the drive.This means all data has been destroyed due to platter damage, caused by the heads coming into contact with the [...]

Not being able to sleep, with the hell-weather outside and the coldness now creeping inside too, I’m reminded of something I wrote exactly a year ago, when and where it was spring.
Grown inside a tree hereThe lemons sweet as, plums, as sweet as cherriesAccepting the extending light through a door ajarto step out like [...]

Right now, I’m watching the interview of the parents of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the first school mass murderer in Finland, who killed 8 of his classmates and then himself in November 2007. I was in Australia then and it didn’t really sink in. This phenomenon repeated in Kauhajoki just over a month ago, and the police [...]

How would you look like if you just lost $700 million (of someone else’s money)?

I love finding stuff like this: innovative, at the same time giving you an immediate insight into how it was thought of, and how the same way of looking at other things might yield more innovations. It’s called Replug, and it does to your headphone cable the same thing the Apple did to their laptop [...]

Now that things are nicely underway with the business, I feel it’s a good time to update on my latest serious endeavour. I was asked to join a consulting outfit called Gemic as the managing partner earlier this year, and given the other people in the project, I’m very happy about the prospect. Johannes and [...]

Long time since I’ve done a music post, so here comes the noise. I just bought some club gig tickets for about €150, for experiences immeasurable. First, Finland finally, finally gets to welcome Om (site is down ATM), Southern Lord’s finest duo, who beach here November 3rd. With absolute poetic and artistic justice, they are [...]

Pack slowlyover several daysbut always as an afterthought         and if not sure         when you’ll depart         if at allhave a 30-litre backpackalways packed, next to the doorready to go         then, when departingremove one third of everything you’ve packedleave a noteand close the door softlyAt this moment of departurerenounce an addiction:Anything you may think you havethis will pave your dedication for [...]

I quite like the way Wordle sees my blog. Nothing much more to say, will keep the bliss and quiet. Happy July! 

The Trip: Israel

No rest for the restless! I just paid a quick visit to Israel – Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea – spent time in London meeting friends (thanks Jon, Teppo), bought a motorcycle and started off with my friend Juha towards Finland. I’m writing this in Gent, Belgium, where Tijs and [...]

Ok, the domain seems to work again. This is a bit of a test post. Godaddy did get the DNS’s mixed up for a sec and didn’t let me update them for a few hours resulting in about 5 hours of downtime. Luckily this is not a mission-critical site, although I was already told my [...]

There might be a small glitch in the pages as I’m rationalizing my hosting packages (GoDaddy gets everything, they’re just too good).
In the meantime, we just launched a revamped site for Turnleft Guides with a newsletter, blog, a simple Google Checkout module for getting guides in the mail (they are free when picked up and [...]

Three weeks back in Finland today. Doesn’t feel too bad at all, and it looks good too – here is the view from my window right now, at my dad’s house that is. The days are long already and I seem to fill them with even more to do than I planned. Prioritize, not procrastinate, [...]

Warning: contains 80% introspection and 20% retrospection.
This is me on my last week, in NYC right now. Yes, I’ve been here before, as I of course had in SF where I hung out just before this, but it’s a good soft landing, I’m learning. Instead of rushing off straight back to London or Helsinki and [...]

Finally, here are my thoughts on Peru: Lima, Nasca, Machu Picchu and the last leg of the full-time trip.

The Trip: Machu Picchu

After Buenos Aires and Santiago, Lima felt like a pit. The squander was much more visible, and the country looked like a war zone in some places. Which it has recently been in [...]

I’ve gotten on average five hours of sleep per night in all of South America. It’s starting to show through. Here are my heartfelt from Machu Picchu. Rubbish quality courtesy of Nokia N80. More photos and a proper report on Peru (Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Lima) coming up!  

I’ve wanted to visit Buenos Aires for a long time, and it really is an experience. BA was declared a “City of Design” by UNESCO and where as I’m yet to make up my mind as to the merits of the design the city features (the Authority of Everything I so obviously am), it’s does [...]

Easter Island took me for 3 days longer than I’d planned to stay there – the 4 day stay that I had planned initially, thinking it might be too much and leave me bored, would have been way too little. Certainly, the main monuments, the moai, are seen quite quickly in a day, but there [...]

This is me enjoying a 5 hour delay in the Biz Class lounge at Auckland International before my flight (allegedly) departs for Santiago. I squeezed in 5 days for looking through the North Island, and while this was another wonderful excursion, I’m very happy I spent the bulk of my time in the country on [...]

The rains over the last two days seem to have washed my mind off the island paradise of Vorovoro, and today the retreating tide finally took me with it. Our intrepid boat captain Johnny just dropped me off at Labasa after a trip navigating the low-tide mangrove channels back to the mainland. With the rain [...]

It’s windy and wet in Fiji, and if planes fly and boats run, I’ll be in Vorovoro with Tribewanted tomorrow, finally! But it’s all tentative – tropical cyclone Funa, as of writing this, is pretty close to Fiji, and otherwise it’s the wet season anyway. I just took a pretty bumpy ride back from [...]

The Trip: NZ, pt. 3

South Island Adventure has been finished, 10 days later. Next, I’m recovering in Christchurch and then flying to Fiji, where two paradise islands await me – very different in nature. Tribewanted’s Vorovoro is the main attraction and the apex of my trip, but the extra days I have in the country [...]

The Trip: NZ, a few more days

Uuh yes, New Zealand gets better and better. Quite nothing like boating with dolphins jumping under a waterfall, is there? The above photos are from a few nature/special reserves: Milford Sound, Mavora Lakes, Deer Park, and Fantail Falls (the dolphins are from the first one), in addition to beaches, [...]

Greetings from Middle-Earth. Uh, I mean New Zealand. I’ve already mixed up the two in my head more than once, and Middle-Earth seems to stick. So be it. Minus the cape and mediaeval replica weaponry, I’m soon in full LOTR-nerd mode having planned out a pretty good itinerary for checking out most of the filming [...]

The Vipassana meditation retreat was an excellent experience. Not only were the 10 days themselves the perfect envelope of silence and reflection, the days after the retreat have been notably good as well. The technique seems to deliver, although I also feel the distinct sharpening of the senses developed during the 10 days slightly dulling [...]

Hi from Melbourne, still. I’ll be taking off on the 10-day Vipassana Meditation course starting tomorrow which includes total silence, so I’ll be even quieter than normal. So I’ll speak now.

Also, here’s some photos from a roam across the outback and the Southern coast with the Belgians. Ta-daah for now.

The Trip: Windswept

The sound of the opening road is thunderand inside the windows marked in burning codeare maps with dragons and horizons asunderin the house where my restlessness has overflowed
A raging moon now kept awake by cricketsin the pregnant air of the morning floodplainclouds smuggle out the sun in their pocketsand of heat the road roars again
A [...]

Picking up posting after a long pause is always a bit difficult, especially when there’s not that much really really exciting stuff to say. I’ve stayed in Melbourne for the last two weeks and borrowed friends apartment in Sydney for a week before that. Both stays have been excellent and the people very nice. I’m [...]

I love these guys. As a response to Norwegian Venstre-party leader Lars Sponheim’s suggestion that all music downloading should be made legal, the two founding members of the progressive black metal band Enslaved “downloaded” a sheep from Sponheim’s ranch. There’s a video (scroll down for it) in this article (in Norwegian) that features footage of [...]

Goodness, how much fun metal music can be! I just bought Devin Townsend’s latest disc from an unassuming Sydney record shop and have now listened the concept album through three times. On the disc named after the galactic coffee-connoisseur, Ziltoid the Omniscient lands on Earth in search of the perfect cup of coffee. Allegedly, the [...]

My local friends haven’t been too helpful with my dilemma of whether to stay in Sydney or in Melbourne the few months I’ve planned to spend here. Everybody, quite naturally, seems to prefer home turf.
Riding around this beautiful country I’ve also run into the most charming little mountain towns and rural villages, and during my [...]

I’m not in Helsinki, but if I would be, I’d go and see Ahmija (The Glutton) in Teatteri Jurkka. It sounds to be a great experience, but unfortunately undiscovered by the larger audiences. Check out this thoughtful review if you need more on it. 

I didn’t mention I got down here safely, so maybe that’s in order quickly – completing this leg without an accident greatly increases my touring trip safety ratio. I’ve stayed with friends in Manly, a yell north from Sydney, which certainly is one of the top cities in the world. But I’m still hesitant to [...]

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Here is the first mow-down in Australia. I meant to spend much longer exploring the north of the country, but the circumstances dictate (read: my shit bank, per below post) that I need to go to Sydney this week. Fine, let’s make the most of it then. I’ve been on the beaches quite [...]

Citibank UK has now screwed me over for the last time. Trying to use the ATM two days back, I found that my card had been blocked. Fair enough, I’d been pulling out large amounts in order to pay for a motorcycle, in cash. I called them from Australia, on a UK number, and after [...]

What should I think of this: after approving an initial set of product samples, a supplier in China tells me that there is a shortage of raw materials for this particular product, and that the price per item would need to be increased to 13 dollars (which happens to be very close to a nice, [...]

The Trip: Thai, Malaysia, Singapore

Yeah, down under finally! The guesthouse, hotel and backpacker circuit was getting a bit old for me by now, so getting to Oz and to friends is like a breath of fresh air. Quite literally – it smell like spring, yet the weather is consistently like the best summer’s day in [...]

Just felt a pretty steady heave and shake in Singapore 20 minutes ago, and sure enough, there’s been a 7.9 richter earthquake in Souther Sumatra. Better stay tuned to the news now, especially in the coastal areas in the region. There’s loads of shakes in the area, but 8 richter is pretty big.
 

I’m really loving Singapore. Got here 48 hours ago and I’ve already romped through multiple galleries, hawker food centres and coffeeshops. As an added bonus, though my Drum&Bass afficionadoship was short-lived and almost a decade ago, catching Goldie in Singapore was really exciting. As a bonus to the bonus, the setting was perfect – the [...]

Search! In Google Reader! Congratulations, but jesus, didn’t that take for ever? I migrated to Vienna a long long time ago, but I’ll see if the Google Reader client is worth coming back to now. Google Reader isn’t Mac native though, and it shows, but maybe it’ll get ironed out.
Read the announcement at Official Google [...]

Ok, fine, I’ll blog about the iPhone. Jeez. My feed reader is aflame from yesterday’s announcement of new iPods (fat Nanos! touch-screen iPods!), but the biggest issue aren’t the new products – it’s the price drop in iPhone. Launched, what, two months ago, at the price of $599, it’s now been dropped to $399. For [...]

I read way too much into myself in this book. With its multiple levels and drifts of symbolism throughout, The Bridge hurled me into the deep.
Synopsis that fails to do any justice to the impact: a man is in a coma and lives in his internal world, a seemingly endless bridge. He reflects both [...]

This from Ko Phangan – along with the three book reviews I’ve piled up recently, posted below. Next Kuala Lumpur, then the island of Pulau Tioman, then Singapore. Let’s go.
 

Rarely have I finished a book in one sitting, and to be perfectly honest, I did move from the breakfast table to the hammock halfway through Philip Roth’s Everyman. But I think that counts.
It’s a sobering novel of family, death and love, told in straightforward, uncomplicated language, the kind that you must speak to [...]

A word of warning. “The Cult of the Amateur” must be one of the worse books I’ve read and gotten through. Penned by Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley Brit who, it sounds, has grown bitter at the web 2.0 phenomenon, is chock-a-block with misinterpretations, misinformation and data taken our of context. Keen has a couple [...]

I just finished reading On Writing, the memoir of the craft by Stephen King. I read King a lot when I was young, and I think The Stand was the first book I read in English that I was completely obsessed about, probably when I was around 13. It left me exhausted, wondering how a [...]

I’ve piled up posts a lot lately. Not that I haven’t been doing stuff, but for some reason there are still drafts standing in the list. I’ll offload them sooner or later, but now y’all deserve to see some of the Angkor Wat photos.

The Trip: Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is unmissable. You shouldn’t come in the [...]

The more I think about travelling in Australia, the more dedicated I am to spend at least 2-3 months there – and buy a motorcycle. It’s turning out difficult to get insurance for a Finnish guy with a UK license on an Australian bike, but paperwork’s never stopped me (until it’s been too late, on [...]

Finally, an answer. This is why my footbag technique has been sub-par all these years.

Brandish picked up a great article on tying shoelaces for different styles and purposes. The season is on at all the hostels and beaches I’m hitting, so will keep this in mind.
 

Something I stumbled upon today and wanted to share with y’all.
Josh Greene is a San Francisco-based waiter and artist. A common combination in Nor-Cal art circles, I’ve observed based on the little experience I have from there. What makes Mr. Greene special is his private, personal foundation Service-Works. Every month, he donates one night’s worth [...]

The Trip: Cambodia, S21

Two small photo albums from Cambodia, very different in nature. The Nikon D40 is starting to make a difference – I’m shooting more if nothing else. The first one is from S21 in Phnom Phen, where Pol Pot’s regime detained and executed thousands of Cambodians. School turned torture center, it’s a harrowing [...]

The Trip: Vietnam #2

This comes from Phnom Phen, but here’s more photos from the way up here on the Mekong river. We stayed in a little border town for one night on the way, so it took a total of two days on a wooden slow boat.
What made me blog now is intellectual capital and [...]

Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.*
But when I wake up I don’t think I’m going to wake up in the jungle. Yet it’s a movie worth making a pilgrimage for. Today I went to see the Chu Chi tunnels the Viet Cong inhabited for long years and tomorrow I’m taking a boat from Saigon [...]

This is an experimental video blog post. No holiday stuff, just internal monologue about the impacts of travel. I may or may not make this a habit, let’s see how it grows on me (watch the video to get the pun. If you did already: weak, cheap pun, I admit).
While I’m at it, uploading the [...]

This is me jumping into conclusions, I guess, but I fail to see what the India-hype is about. Granted, I’ve only been to major cities, some countryside in between and seen the main sights – I tried to get to Rishikesh but the main road was closed due to the holy month processions and [...]

Two books with titles Investment Biker and Adventure Capitalist had caught my eye over the years many times. Finally, in Hong Kong, I decided to go out and buy the latter one. Written by Jim Rogers, co-founder of the Quantum Fun (with George Soros – not that his name gets mentioned by Jim; I wonder [...]

I traded Kyoto’s sweltering heat for Osaka’s soft summer rain today. The mere hour on the train made a huge difference. Kyoto had been surprisingly peaceful: as if the cultural heritage evident everywhere would cool things down even in the +35 centigrade heat I bicycled through to temples and shrines for two days. [...]

An essay on assigning meaning to the evolution of consciousness (don’t worry, more holiday photos coming up in the next post soon).
Abstract: The only quality separating humans from animals is our ability to craft elaborate excuses for our instincts.
On the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I finished reading Richard Wright’s Nonzero (thanks for the [...]

Finally in Japan. I’ve wanted to come here for such a long time. The first 24 hours have been quite tourist-y, seeing some sights and just walking and wondering. I’m heading down to Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima already tomorrow.
It’s pretty warm here, sure, but something in the light and in the air still tells [...]