Sunday, July 8, 2012

Sparse Swedish Thoughts


  • My talk is in a couple of hours, i should finish it instead of writing here
  • Stockholm is just amazing: it looks like nobody is really rich and nobody is poor. On average everybody is wealthy enough and the standard deviation is tiny. I guess that's the secret of this country (plus the fact it's just 10 millions people)
"Blond girls... blond girls everywhere"

  • Smart thing #1: the waiting time for next metro to come is written outside the metro station, rather than inside, so that  one knows it in advance and can run or take it slowly. 
  • Smart thing #2: in the same platform there is never the same line going in one direction and in the opposite. It's always two different lines. Just think about that. The connections are extremely quick. You get off one metro, and you usually find your connection 5 meters right in front of you. Not to mention that I waited the metro for 3 minutes at most. Metro in Rome is ridiculous in comparison.
  • The conference is huge and relatively well organized (comparing to what i was told about the previous MG meeting in Paris, which i didn't attend)
  • However, frankly speaking one does not really get much out of these huge conferences: there were many interesting talks, but those I was interesting in were simultaneous and I missed most of them
  • On the other hand, our section went quite OK... there were definitely too many subjects, but we also had a couple of very interesting contributions
  • Don't think Swedish people are more workaholic than Germans. They are actually the Mediterranean and relaxed version of northern country people. Basically, if you go further norther, the relaxing attitude starts increases at some point. Perra and his cyclic vision of the world would appreciate this fact.
  • Talking about appreciated fact, i think that the picture above is self-explanatory 


[This post was written on Friday and scheduled for Sunday]

2 comments:

Consul said...

1) I agree that in Sweden things are better organized.
2) Don't tell anyone, but what made the wealth distribution so narrow is socialism.

Unknown said...

That is exactly the point! One can see imprints of years of socialism everywhere... in fact, people are deeply socialist inside :)