Wandering Adventure Party

@datarama @cstross @Richard_Littler

I don't think the Romans built anywhere near that tall. I think it wasn't until well into the middle ages that buildings surpassed the pyramids in height.

There's a popular idea that the Eiffel Tower was the first structure taller than the pyramids, but that's false. People in the middle ages got ridiculously good at building tall from all those cathedrals.

The Lincoln Cathedral in 1311 surpassed it, but it's possible that the Yongning Pagoda already briefly surpassed it in 516.

@mina @Richard_Littler

We were in Interlaken! With two kids! And I had no idea I had the perfect opportunity to introduce them to the fascinating world of slightly racist pseudoscience.

A single company crashing doesn't mean the entire sector was a bubble. How are other companies doing?

Yesterday evening I had my most intense reading experience in decades, reading the climax of Iain M Banks' Consider Phlebas .

I'm a bit under the weather, last day of vacation before we'd return home from Saxon Switzerland and really should have been in bed, but I simply couldn't put the book down for 100 pages of slowly and dreadfully building climax.

I'm a very slow reader, and normally my brain has a tendency to fall asleep reading while I would prefer to focus on the book, but this was the polar opposite: I had to stop but couldn't.

#iainmbanks #theculture #considerphlebas