I looked at myself with interest. This in itself was striking, for I wasn’t the kind of man who looked at himself in mirrors. I was the kind of man who spent as little time as possible in front of mirrors, the kind of man who had a brisk and practical relation to his reflection, with its…
The 2012 Feltron Annual Report is now online.
Print copies are available for pre-order here: http://feltron.bigcartel.com
The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can’t understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth … How far from here was 34th street?… All those buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless. But, fortunately, it’s been useless for almost forty years now, hasn’t it? So I’ve been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I’m glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.
“
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Richard Feynman On his emotional reactions after the first uses of the atomic bomb. Part 3: “Feynman, The Bomb, and the Military”, “Los Alamos from Below” 1985 (via mediocrejournalism) |
The Economist Intelligence Unit has released its annual cost-of-living index which uses the weighted average of prices for 160 products and services to compare global cities.
No surprise that Tokyo leads the list, but New York jumping 19 places since 2012? Alarming.
We asked our readers what they plan to die of:
92% said “being infinitely pleasured”
8% said they’d “wing it”
