Kista looks quite different in the snow.
Kista in the snow
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Igelbäcken natur reserve
Between Kista and the centre of Stockholm the TBana passes through a nature reserve. This forms a part of the cities green belt, and is marked with a series of paths and cross country tracks, with different colours denoting different distance circuits.
Sunset at Skansen
Some views over the city at the end of our day at Skansen – it was a particularly beautiful sunset.
Ice skating in Kungstragården
We found some ice skating in Kungstragården, a lot of the squares (or torgs) here have public skating rinks in. These are available for all to use.
Skansen again
We went to Skansen again when my sister came to visit.
Nyköping
At the end of the road to Skavsta there is the small industrial town of Nyköping, the NYO Skavsta gets its IATA airport code from.
The town itself clearly used to be a major industrial centre, but now it is more of a tourist centre, with the old mills next to the river turned into heritage museums and handcraft shops. Unfortunately I didn’t find the river until after dark so didn’t get to see it properly, so would like to explore it a little more during daylight.
Road to Skavsta
I hired a car to collect A from the airport upon her return recently, it had snowed a little in the few days beforehand, but the roads themselves were clear. The cars here come with spiked tyres, which make quite a racket when theres no snow underwheel.
Högalids kyrka
A picture of Högalids kyrka (swedish) – just as it came from the camera. A spooky night indeed.
Vaxholm
I got off the boat to Vaxholm to explore while I awaited the next return boat back to the city centre. The town itself is a small town of around 5000 people, sometimes considered the capital of the archipelago.
It is not a large town, though it does have an impressive castle, standing protecting the waterway connecting Stockholm to the Baltic sea. The town is largely made of wooden built houses, with a few modern buildings of other materials.
I took this picture because I liked the ancient trees, but then noticed the driver training setup
Book review: Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb
[Audiobook]
Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Everyday Life, is a book about the meaning and value of risk taking. The main premise being that for risk taking to have any value there must be some downside for the risk taker. If you have no Skin in the Game, you have no place to be rewarded for the risks you are not taking.
A lot of his worldview comes from his origin as a trader where he learned how to understand and tame risk for his own use, where he also rebelled against the risk controls enforced by his trading masters which held back his ability to put his all into his trades for them.
He covers a lot of examples from the worlds of business and politics, and expresses a particular disdain for career academics, those who have experienced the real world and returned to academia get more of his respect.
One observation he makes is the distinction between risks when seen from an individual and a population point of view, especially where there is risk of ruin for individuals. Populations can benefit from such risks even if they are not rational for individuals. This has parallels with the medical world, where doctors and patients have very different views of those risks and the payoffs from them. I am still trying to find a good exploration of this distinction in the medical realm – I have some ideas in my head of the distinction, but cannot articulate them fluently. I have also seen translation of some of these population disease dynamics ideas into understanding error prevalence in an installed base of embedded systems, but again lack any kind of research to back those ideas up.
While I have read previous books by Taleb, Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan, I picked up on more political opinion in this than his previous works. That opinion sometimes sits uncomfortably with me – I understand he’s got a point to make and it backs that up, but he veers further into libertarian and laissez faire territory than I would like.
There is a kind of breathless self-importance to the voicing (of this audiobook) which verges rather too far toward arrogance given some of the content and its criticism of the works of ‘lesser minds’. The reading itself is clear and accent easy enough to listen to, and would come over better with other, less pompous, material.
The book is a collection of books arranged over a weird collection of chapters – this might make more sense in the printed version but adds a layer of confusion in the audio version.