Deed – Reason – How – Best – Worst – Moral – Pics Deed During the summer of 1990 I cycled from Sanremo (Italy) to Porto (Portugal) with my friend Antonio Galatà. Reason At 20 you don’t need much of a reason to do stuff. I woke up one day and decided it would be a great […]
Q – “Will the big banks crash the party that FinTech entrepreneurs started?” A – “No, for elephants can’t be shrews”. This is a translation, with much poetic licence, of something I heard during a panel session at a recent Innovate Finance event. Flying the flag for the shrews was Giles Andrews, CEO of Zopa, […]
During the week of Feb 8-13 2015, I joined a merry band of FinTech entrepreneurs specially selected for a Grand Tour of Boston and New York with Mayor of London Boris Johnson. The aim? To promote British excellence with American East Coast’s business community – an ambitious trip organised by the Mayor’s Office, UKTI, LondonAndPartners […]
I just got to page 19 of Stephen Fry’s engaging book (“The Ode Less Travelled” published in 2007 – how come I only found it now?). I mean, truly engaging, for, at this point, it asked me to spend 10 minutes jotting down 20 lines of iambic pentameters to get accustomed to poetic writing. A […]
Even before and ever since wily Odysseus had his men’s ears waxed and his body strapped to the mast has humanity been aware of the magical powers of pure voices singing in unison. Couple that with large numbers and the magic multiplies. A resonance effect appears to be at work when learnt, repetitive actions are shared […]
ΠΑΝΤΑ ΡΕΙ (Panta rhei). If everything flows, life is about surfing without catastrophic accidents. We are fundamentally harnessers, not creators. Creation is a godly power. To make any wish and to see it come true. Harnessing requires hard work. The best is the one that wastes the least. In the game of waste not, perfection […]
One of the foundations of structured data design is Entity-Relationship (E-R) modelling. A long time ago, when I first saw the E-R diagram of a reasonably complex trading system, I was fascinated by its image of logically interconnected boxes: an impressive “skeleton” where the little box on the bottom right might be affected by the […]
There are a thousand reasons to visit Naples: majestic Vesuvius, incomparable Neapolitan Pizza, breathtaking Capri and Ischia, unmissable archaeological sites (Pompeii, Herculaneum, the National Archaeological Museum), beautiful weather, beautiful people. Naples was the backdrop for Admiral Nelson’s love affair with Emma Hamilton: a commercial, political and cultural hub that was a key destination of Victorian […]
888,246 poppies. “It is said that Calchas the seer came here from Troy […] and died of vexation when he chanced to meet a seer […] who was greater than himself. Mopsus, the son of Manto […]. Calchas set Mopsus the following problem: ‘Amazement strikes my heart at how many figs this fig tree has, […]
The symposium (literally “communal drinking”) is one of the social traditions that has survived since the dawn of civilisation, when Demeter and Dionysus gifted the humans with grain and wine. Wine is liquid life-force: under the right circumstances, it joins the souls of those that enjoy it together. Wine is edgy: the same fiery power […]
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