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Athens 2004
I’m back from a week in Athens, and what a week. Patricia and I have been visiting my sister who heads the Art of Living in Greece, and between touring all of Athens and catching some olympic actions, it’s kinda nice to be home again, so we can relax after our holiday :o)
The people of Athens are incredibly nice. We were met with smiles everywhere we went, at the olympic games, on the beaches and in the streets. They’s all friendly, kind an open.
There’s plenty to experience in Athens, and we made the most of it. The acropolis is beautiful of course, and evokes the concept of Greece as the birthplace of our culture. The food is excellent. How a greek salad (tomatoes, cucumber, feta and olives with a simple dressing of olive oil and vinegar) can taste so good is beyond me. We went to an outdoor cinema, and saw a greek movie (with english subtitles) under the starry sky, with the lights from the Acropolis just off to our left.
We went to a couple of beaches and swam in the aegean sea. We also got great tans :o) We walked the streets of Athens withut much of a plan, sitting down at a caf? for beer or coffee frapp?s whenever we got too hot. We always pack books, so we can take a reading break if we want.
We went to no less that six different sports events: Fencing, badminton, beach volley ball, athletics and two womens handball games. At one of the handball games I had the pleasure of teaching two american guys the basics of the sport. They worked as volunteers, got free tickets and had never seen a handball game before.
We even made a new greek friend, Nick, who let us stay in his home for a few nights. That’s the hospitality of the greeks for ya.
It’s been a great week, that’s given us a great feel for what the olympic games do for a city. My main question now is: How quickly can we get the games to Copenhagen?
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Open Space world map
Check out the new and improved Open Space World Map. It’s a seriously cool visualization of how Open Space Technology is spreading around the world.
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More stuff from the happy-at-work conference
We’ve received some more follow-up material on the happy-at-work conference. Suna Christensen is an anthropologist who participated, and has now written a short report on the conference. It’s fascinating reading, and here’s one of my favourite bits:
Work life and private, personal life is traditionally two separate worlds. But through inclusion of being human on the job this conference created a connection where human life as such stretched beyond the known borders. In me an experience was created which means, that it no longer makes sense to speak of work environment as terms or conditions under which we work. In stead, we must search for (new) words and concepts that – as the conference did in practice – kan represent the (contradictory) conditions under which we work.Music to my ears :o) You can find the whole report here – in danish only, though.
Merete Klussman also participated, and she wrote a personal account of her day at the conference. Her article is an excellent description of the day and what participants could get out of the conference. Read Meretes story here.
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Bad astronomy
Philip Plait debunks weird, pseudoscientific claims at his excellent webiste badastronomy.com. Here’s his take on what it’s like to stand up for science:
Have you ever gone to a carnival, or a fair of some kind, and played the game “Whack-a-Mole”? It’s a table with holes in it, and little mechanical rodents pop their heads out for about a half a second. You have to hit them with a mallet. If you wait too long, they duck back under. But every time you hit one, one or two pop up again. No matter how many you whack, there are always more.Pseudoscientists are like those moles. You can whack one down, but then another springs up…
He does an excellent job of it. For a taste, read his debunking of the claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked.
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Better than sex
Inspired by this list of things that are the new black, here’s a Google-assisted list of stuff that is better than sex:
Baseball, Beer, Chocolate, Climbing, Coffee, E-mail, Fencing, Fishing, Food, Gardening, Go, Hack mode, Halloween, Hockey, Nothing, Poetry, PS2, Skiing, Skydiving, Sleeping, Studying, Syntax, Thanksgiving dinner, Trail running, Trick or treating, Wakeboarding, Walking, Werthers, Video on Demand
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Scott Kurtz is a genius
Scott Kurtz is the writer/artist of the PVP online somic strip, and at the recent San Diego Comics convention, he made an announcement that may change the future of newspaper comics syndication:
But I’ve already become attached to the idea of seeing PvP in the papers, and that’s why I’ve decided to start a new program. In the coming months, I’ll be putting into effect, a program in which papers can receive PVP for free. That’s right, free. They don’t have to pay me a cent for it. I will provide for the papers, a comic strip with a larger established audience then any new syndicated feature, a years worth of strips in advance, and I won’t charge them a cent for it.The exposure and prestige of PvP appearing in daily papers would more than pay for itself in a months time. In exchange, I can offer the papers a comics feature that’s tried and tested, funny and best of all, free. They have nothing to lose or risk financially. They can see, in advance, a years worth of strips so they don’t risk me flaking out on them. Most of all, I can provide them with yet another bargaining chip against the very syndicates. This is the perfect climate to take this step.
That’s a brilliant, innovative and gutsy move and I really admire him for coming up with it. You can read his entire text here.
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Yaaaaay
They’re here. Should keep me busy for a while :o)
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More books
These should arrive from Amazon any day now :o)
- Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure
- Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions and Fantasies
- Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity (New Practices of Inquiry)
- The Night of the Morningstar: Modesty Blaise (Modesty Blaise S.)
- The Silver Mistress (Modesty Blaise S.)
- The Borrible Trilogy: “The Borribles”, “The Borribles Go for Broke”, “Across the Dark Metropolis”
- Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
- A Bell for Adano
- The Consultants [AUDIOBOOK]
- Market Forces (Gollancz SF S.)
- Principle-centered Leadership
- Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
- The Getaway Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
- Down Here (Burke Novels)
- Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent & Your Child a Better Person
- Another Chance to Get It Right
- Power of Servant Leadership
- Catch!: A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness
- Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds
- Newton’s Wake
- Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work
- The Office – The Complete Series 1 (2 Disc Set) [2001]
- Lost Horizons
- The Office Series 2 [2001]
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Alan Moore on media, fascism and more
That might be a horrifying notion but I’m sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they’ll probably believe the television set in the end. It’s an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical — in the very best sense of the word — inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.
Alan Moore is the writer of many excellent graphic novels, including V for Vendetta, From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In this excellent interview on Salon, he explains (among other things) his very bleak vision of what TV is doing to us, our culture and particularly to politics. President Springsteen, anyone? Via Boingboing.
I’m not sure my view of the effect of TV is quite so pessimistic, and at the very least you have to factor in all the good that having cheap, globally accessible mass media has brought. I have a deep conviction though, that the sheer amount of time spent in front of TV’s all over the world could be used for better purposes, and does on the whole not contribute much to our happiness.
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