Month: July 2010

Music as Fuel

I was digging up the Hunter S Thompson quote on living life to the full …. you know the one … “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

When I came across this one close to my heart:

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
— Hunter S. Thompson

The Wrong Stuff

From the Slate, a piece by Kathryn Shulz interviewing ex-astronaut James Bagian on relative risks and relative attention to risks in bleeding edge exploration and business-as-usual.

[Post Note :  I have since read the complete article and it is really very good, on the human psychology side of “error” and risk, and between error and harm, proximate individual causes and fixable systemic causes, etc. One side connection – Bagian mentions the little appreciated fact that the Challenger crew hearts were still beating when their cockpit escape module hit the ocean – reminded me of a comment I made recently on the F111 Wikipedia page, where the crew escape module was mis-captioned – since corrected on the main page.]

[And whilst we’re here : That Kathryn Shulz post is just one of a series of blogged interviews on the subject of “wrongology”.]