This book sees de Botton travelling on a commercial fishing vessel, shadowing an accountant for a day, and accompanying an aeronautical engineering team as they prepare and launch a rocket into space, among other adventures. He takes us through each assignment and uses them to muse on how human beings use their time, and why, and how we might do it better.
Continue readingOn mental illness: “I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure”, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore enforced, debility.” – Joan Didion, in Blue Nights
“The Scrutonizer”*, real name Roger Scruton (or more correctly and impressively, Sir Roger Scruton) is an English conservative (but not Conservative) philosopher. He is no right-wing loony though — his views tend to be very carefully considered and sensible. This … Continue reading
I just agreed to these terms and conditions for something that Apple want to install on my computer. I can’t read them and still have no idea what was installed, if anything. How much time and money is wasted by these pointless clickwrap agreements? twitter.com/bnnt/status/1153616685376520193/photo/… 
A bad 19th-century Russian novel inspired Ayn Rand’s bad 20th-century novels, which inspired Alan Greenspan to become chairman of the US Federal Reserve and “destroy the world” by laying the foundations for the Global Financial Collapse of 2008. That’s the … Continue reading
You too can be free from the tyranny of hair. (Beauty salon in Mt Eden, Auckland) twitter.com/bnnt/status/1147988767480766464/photo/… 
Happy Tau Day. Yes, pi is STILL wrong. tauday.com/ #tauday #tau #pi #fb via ifttt.com/recipes/414895-tweet-about-tau-day
One of the great joys of mathematics is the incontrovertible feeling that you’ve understood something the right way, all the way down to the bottom. Continue reading
Another reason to volunteer: idp.scientificamerican.com/authorize/ #fb
This experimental “found novel” is great. Once I got into it, it was like a beautifully edited minimalistic fly-on-the-wall documentary in print. Continue reading
