Pligget
Little to say for myself


Monday, January 10, 2005

Feel like life's just too damned challenging these days?

  
If you're having a rough start to the week, and feeling like you're up against it, have a quick peek at Ellen MacArthur's Team Ellen website. This follows her progress, currently in the Southern Ocean approaching Cape Horn, in her bid to become the fastest ever sole circumnavigator. She's nearly 5 days ahead of the record holder after 44 days, with a third of the journey left to go.

It's an amazing testament to modern technology: tracking her progress in real time on maps and in figures, showing you webcam photos of different views of her and the boat, looking at weather charts and forecasts, and allowing you to hear her reports and send her emails.

Flick back through the archive and read her accounts of the sheer hard physical work, the lack of time to eat or sleep, the scares as the boat is thrown through the air by some of the waves, the near-misses with 300 metre-wide icebergs, and I reckon you'll be left with three things:

  • maybe my life isn't as hectic as I first thought
  • what an amazing person she is
  • I want to send her an email of encouragement

Just one word of warning: following her inexorable progress can get addictive...

posted by Plig | 16:17 |

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Forget the sentimental notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice, with virtue bound to win.
Forget the utopian notion that a brave new world without power politics will follow the unconditional surrender of wicked nations.
Forget the crusading notion that any nation, however virtuous and powerful, can have the mission to make the world in its own image.
Remember that diplomacy without power is feeble, and power without diplomacy is destructive and blind.
Remember that no nation's power is without limits, and hence that its policies must respect the power and interests of others.
Hans Morgenthau

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts
Bertrand Russell

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one
Albert Einstein

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative
Martin Luther King Jr.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man
Bertrand Russell

I think it would be a good idea
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun
Pablo Picasso

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others
Groucho Marx

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it
Mahatma Gandhi

Always make new mistakes
Esther Dyson
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