Daily Slow Chat

4 comments

1. Many people know that the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is currently the tallest building in the world, though not for much longer…a taller one is being built in Jeddah at the moment.

   Fewer people probably know that the tallest building in Europe is in Russia, and the tallest in the EU in Poland.

   My question is… what’s the tallest building where you live or where you are from, and have you ever been up to the top?

2. In today’s news in Finland: while a study done about a year ago showed working from home to cause feelings of loneliness and some other problems, a newer study shows more encouraging results. Maybe people have adjusted? Maybe the way in which some companies are making some office days mandatory has changed the situation, either by reducing loneliness, or highlighting just how peaceful the days working from home are?

   I’m wearing contact lenses for the first time in a while. It’s pure luxury: instead of having a shrunk version of reality in a frame, and a blur outside of that frame, there are no limits, and I can easily focus on any part of my field of vision. It’s crazy to think some people see like this all the time, with no requirements for glasses.

   [I once photoshopped an image](https://imgur.com/a/glasses-vs-no-glasses-vs-20-20-ZT39tRT) trying to display what things look like with myopia. One disturbing thing about the bottom one (wearing glasses) is that you can see the tips of your feet both outside of the frame and inside it. Everytime you get new glasses, you have to be extra careful in stairs.

3. The number plate symbol for Kiel is KI, which lends itself to writing all kinds of fun stuff. Like… hm, I don’t know actually. I would probably choose KI*EL. That sounds creative and fun. I saw this morning that a Mr McEdgelord had KI*LL. That is a big aggressive. Or maybe I am wrong and it’s just a coincidence.

   There’s been some complaints about people not separating their trash properly at the university guesthouse, which resulted in the trash to be recycled not being taken by the company. I am wondering if it is a good idea at all to enforce trash separation in such a large place with people from all over the world, some of whom only stay in Germany for a few weeks or months. It is hard enough to learn for new residents who plan to stay here.

4. Besides reading the newspaper from 100 years ago I’ve also started to occasionally reading issues of Suomen Kuvalehti from a century ago. It’s like Time Magazine or something like that, a weekly magazine with more in-depth articles. Anyway, in this weeks issue which was released 14.3.1925 there was a story from Alaska.

   In some far away village there was an outbreak of a bacterial disease, and they couldn’t fly in the needed medicine because it was -50°C. I mean, you have to take one look at airplanes from the 1920s and it’ll become immediately obvious why flying in that kind of weather wouldn’t be very pleasant. So instead they sent this Finnish guy Leonard Seppälä who was apparently like the best dog sled driver (or something like that) in the world at time. 4 times in a row he had won the most prestigious dog sledding competition in North-America, the All-Alaska Sweepstakes. He was originally from Lapland near the Finnish-Norwegian border but moved to Alaska in 1900.

   So he and his dogs, lead by the Siberian Malamutes Scotty and Togo (and 18 other dogs), made the 650 km journey and successfully delivered the medicine to this village. Unfortunately though it wasn’t enough, and the outbreak worsened, so they eventually had to just fly more medicine in.

   I googled his name just now, and Wikipedia calls him Kven and Norwegian, while the article in the magazine just calls him Finnish. Also the temperatures stated are different.