My last post here was from around three years ago. I have already admitted to being a slow blogger but three years is perhaps stretching even that epithet a bit. Facebook is mostly too superficial for the kind of writing that I’m thinking about. I can’t come up with witty enough short comments to command a following on Twitter. This pretty much leaves shutting up or writing here, on my entirely own blog, hosted on my entirely own, home-built Ubuntu-computer under my own desk. And shutting up completely has never really been my thing.
It’s kind of interesting to go back to my posts from three and more years back to see what has happened since then. A few random observations:
- I’m still listening to Spotify which is still a great service even though songs sometimes disappear from my playlists due to ever changing licensing schemes. But there are real humans answering support mail at Spotify when I complain about this. They will even trade jokes with you if you start.
- The Swedish school is still in reverse getting worse and worse results in the PISA surveys. At the same time Sweden is #2 on the list of the world’s most innovative countries [1] and #3 on the list of the world’s most competitive economies [2] (on both lists beaten by the other country we’re always confused with, Switzerland). South Korea, with the best schools, doesn’t even make top 20 on any of the lists. Maybe the effect of the poor school is not yet seen or maybe school results aren’t all that important among other factors. (I hope that we are spared the ultimate irony: that we are doing so well because of the poor test scores.)
- I just purchased an e-book by Sam Harris, Free Will (should be called “Lack of …” instead) that basically argues along the same lines as I did in my early posts about the same topic. Next time I need to be quicker to the publisher. Btw, I didn’t buy e-books back in 2009. Now I only buy e-books that I read on my phone and on my pad (both from South Korea, not Sweden…).
There are definitely a few things to write more about. I’ll try not to wait another three years.
Links
[1] The Global Innovation Index 2012.
[2] The Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012.