all of my blogs will be involved
Filed under: culture, education, politics, popular culture, web
February 17, 2008 • 6:45 pm 0
Today I was through in Glasgow for a Killy reunion. It was fun to meet all these people that I hadn’t been at school with, although it transpired that I’d tried to teach some of their offspring. One lady there was a member of another of Edinburgh’s Buddhist sanghas and she’d just been visiting the Portobello Priory (which is where I attend) last Friday. Another nice thing this same lady told me was that she’d given a eulogy at the Scottish Parliament for a recently deceased, long-standing member of the Edinburgh Buddhist scene. So this was an ex-Killy kid addressing the Scottish Parliament—which was one of John A’s great dreams (a Scottish Parliament that is).
I’ve not been through in Glasgow for a while and about the only place I always must visit when I do go through is Borders bookstore (to be American). However I defy anyone to go into that shop and not buy something (it’s much nicer than their Edinburgh shop), and today for me was no exception.
Leafing through one of my purchases on the train home I came across the following:
On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.”
Yes that’s you (and me:)
I think that this is the plaque referred to:
Filed under: books, education, misc, science, scotland, today, trivia
February 9, 2008 • 2:21 pm 0
Shinichiro Hori
Educator hopes to revive sister school in Scotland
So what I’ve heard on the grapevine is true—interesting!
“We hope that at the Scottish school, students will be able to meet various people with different ideas. It’s great if students can realize that they can communicate with each other as the same human beings, even though we speak different languages,” Hori said.
(I see the Japan Times piece is 2004, I’m a bit out of the loop I will admit:)
January 28, 2008 • 9:15 pm 0
trailer for not very good cbeebies program about summerhill’s fight
However the program includes the scene where the judge in the high court allows the children to hold a school meeting to decide whether to accept the government’s backdown on its attempt to close the school. Ridiculously good moment to see on TV.
BBC piece about the victory: Summerhill closure threat lifted.
Neill is another Scot who engenders a great deal of national pride in me and is someone I’d like to have met. Something I wrote about Neill at garyt.f9.
Filed under: culture, education, people I'd like to meet
