PROMPT: Skills or Lessons

Posted on December 16, 2025 by B Gourley

Daily writing prompt

What skills or lessons have you learned recently?

Shopping for crazy. I’ve become aware that – during some time periods, it’s mandated that there be one bat-shit insane person per subway car — and that, if there are more than that, they need to spread out evenly and give the stage to one among them — a Car Crazy Champion, if you will. After riding in a car with a urine-drenched crack addict who paced the length of the car eating (and sloshing) some pungent food from a Styrofoam container, I realized I should have been in the next car with the very nicely dressed and clean-cut man in what seemed to be a self-created and self-imposed uniform reading aloud from the Bible. I no longer concern myself with what car gets me closest to the appropriate exit, rather I shop around for the least objectionable crazy.

DAILY PHOTO: Tricycle Transport in Vietnam

Posted on August 14, 2025 by B Gourley

“From a Railway Carriage” by Robert Louis Stevenson [w/ Audio]

Posted on May 27, 2025 by B Gourley

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
 Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
 And charging along like troops in a battle,
 All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
 All of the sights of the hill and the plain
 Fly as thick as driving rain;
 And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
 Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
 All by himself and gathering brambles;
 Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
 And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
 Here is a cart run away in the road
 Lumping along with man and load;
 And here is a mill and there is a river:
 Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

DAILY PHOTO: Mysuru Rail Museum Exhibits

Posted on December 7, 2024 by B Gourley

DAILY PHOTO: Ship Displays from Melaka Museums

Posted on November 21, 2024 by B Gourley

Cheng Ho Cultural Museum (A museum dedicated to the famous Chinese Admiral Zheng He)

Maritime Museum of Melaka (Flor de la Mar)

PROMPT: Automobile

Posted on December 26, 2023 by B Gourley

What is your all time favorite automobile?

Of the ones I’ve owned, probably the first new car I bought with my own money. It was a 1990 Nissan Sentra, a horrible car — boxy ugly and did not age well (died miserably.) But I paid it off and owned it outright (long before said miserable death.) That said, my sense of sentimentality is not so strong that I can’t admit that it was a shitty car, and I probably made many rookie mistakes in purchasing it. I later owned a Toyota that was a much better car — also looked more like a car than the crate one comes in.

As for cars overall, something affordable, quiet, reasonably comfortable on a long haul, but cheap to fuel. I’m even less a fetishist than a sentimentalist.

Platform Living [Haiku]

Posted on May 15, 2023 by B Gourley

a family lies
 on cardboard mattresses
  to keep bone from stone.

BOOK REVIEW: Invention and Innovation by Vaclav Smil

Posted on February 3, 2023 by B Gourley

Inventions and Innovations: A Brief History of Infatuation, Overpromise, and Disappointment by Vaclav Smil
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Release Date: February 14, 2023

This book is about technological failures, the various ways in which technologies fail, and what lessons can be learned from these failures when hearing about new “world-changing breakthroughs.” The author explores nine technologies in depth, three for each of three varieties of technology failure.

The first group are those technologies that came online as promised, fixing a major problem, only to later be discovered to have side-effects deemed disastrous. The examples used are: leaded gasoline, DDT pesticide, and CFC (Chlorofluorocarbon) refrigerant. These technologies have come to be associated with health defects, air pollution, ecological collapse, and ozone depletion.

The second group (like the first) came online, but then never became competitive with existing technologies. The technologies presented as examples are: airships, nuclear fission for power production, and supersonic flight. Airships died out not only because of the Hindenburg disaster, but also because people preferred airplanes to a craft with the combined slowness of a boat and the crash potential of a plane. Nuclear fission became untenable for new commercial power plants due to a risk premium on build costs even though it doesn’t contribute to global warming and (once powerplants are paid for) is exceedingly cheap per kilowatt-hour. Supersonic flight was just too costly and short-ranged to compete with subsonic flight.

The final group are those technologies that failed to come online at all, despite intense efforts. These include travel by vacuum tube (i.e. Hyperloop, and, yes, like at the bank but with people inside) nitrogen-fixing grains (negating the need for fertilizer,) and nuclear fusion. Despite the celebrity billionaire love of Elon Musk and Richard Branson, hyperloop isn’t advancing because of challenges of maintaining vacuum over large distances. Making cereal grains that feature the nitrogen-fixing capabilities of legumes has also proven more difficult than expected. Nuclear fusion recently experienced a moment in the sun when, for the first time, they got more energy out of it than was needed to achieve it. (This wasn’t written about in the review copy I read, but I suspect will be mentioned in the finished book. At any rate, it doesn’t negate the author’s point as it’s still just one breakthrough of several that would be needed for the technology to be commercially viable.)

In the last chapter, the author gets into a number of other technologies with shorter discussions that are meant to illustrate specific issues with excessive technological optimism. He also investigates some technologies that he believes need to come down the pike, given our present and expected future challenges.

I found this book fascinating. The author seems to love being contrarian (he not only contests popular optimism by those overestimating technological progress but also contests the pessimism regarding the first group of failed technologies, so it appears that he enjoys pointing out how mass opinion [or the opinion of another smart person] is wrong.) That said, there’s a great deal of thought-provoking information in the book. And, I think it can help people more critically consider claims about up-and-coming technologies.

View all my reviews