Today I had no choice and found it very relieving. As I have mentioned, I am in a hostel an hour away from Florence. But I stayed at the hostel for the whole morning and afternoon and needed some lunch at some point. The hostel didn’t offer any. The 100-man-town the hostel was in didn’t offer any. So I walked for 20 min through olive groves to the next 100-man-town. The only venue that offered food was quickly found: That’s where all the old town men drank their espresso and read the newspaper on a Monday afternoon. I entered, and all these old men became silent and turned their heads. Something new! Even young! If I were an old man in a town, I would have turned my head, too.
I felt more comfortable when I found the connected pizzeria, but at 2.30pm they didn’t offer any food anymore. I was hungry and had no choice but to go back to the bar, and some nice bar dude then offered me to make a sandwich. It was the only item on the menu. So I ate my sandwich with ham and cheese and a peach juice, surrounded by old town men who had started speaking again, glancing to the TV with its MTV music (”100% music”) from time to time. Every single song featured “almost sex”, and these old town men in the Tuscany and I paid attention.
How relaxing to be forced to eat that one available sandwich. No choices. No “maybe that restaurant, but I don’t feel like it, but the other one is so far away, and my friend might not like the third one”. Nice.
Also, today I worked for far too long on my Information+ Lightning Talk website abstract. My title for the talk was “Goals in Data Visualisation for Advocacy and Journalism”. I wrote the whole talk structure and website abstract for this talk and noticed at the end that covering both advocacy and journalism is way too much. So I asked the Information+ people if I can change the title, and they agreed….and then I wrote a second talk structure and website abstract. And I worked on an image for their website. My design skills are a little bit rusty, but I’m ok with how it looks now.
Input? 5
Output? 6
Learnings?
It’s surprisingly hard to find mission statements from newspapers.
Kant writes complicated, but he actually talks about stuff that is relevant to my interest. Maybe I should read him. Maybe I should read him in English instead of German - in the belief that everything sounds easier in English and the hope that this is the case with a translated Kant, too. (That is Kant: “Sie bestimmen aber dadurch nicht eine größere Sphäre von Gegenständen, weil, daß solche gegeben werden können, man nicht annehmen kann, ohne daß man eine andere als sinnliche Art der Anschauung als möglich voraussetzt, wozu wir aber keineswegs berechtigt sind.” Come one, how many more commas do you want to pack into that one sentence.)
“Odds” and “probability” are two different things, but refer to the same idea.
Questions?
In which cases is a false model helpful? How false can it be to be still helpful?
Do I actually like more humid areas with lots of water more than areas like the dry Tuscany, or is that some false model about myself that I built without thinking it through?