Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Smitten With Australia
We were so smitten with Australia it is hard to write about our time there without sounding like a Chamber of Commerce travelogue. There was Brisbane, a charming city with a marvelous ferry system on its lifeblood, the Brisbane River, that winds its way through the city. It has one of the best outdoor spaces…
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Scandinavia — A Free-Market Capitalist’s Paradise
Statistically, at least, life in the Scandinavian countries is wonderful. According to the United Nations Quality of Life Survey, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden (the four we visited) were the happiest countries in the world, ranking 1, 4, 10, and 5 respectively. Although the headline makes them sound like Disneyland, the survey’s measure of happiness…
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Uluru Is Way More Than Ayers Rock
The idea of Uluru/Ayers Rock genuinely appealed to me. I love rock formations and deserts (in either order), and Uluru is one of the most impressive of them all, with a circumference of 9.4 kilometers, rising 348 meters above a featureless desert — higher than the Eiffel Tower or the Chrysler Building. It is in…
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Tasmania’s Darker Past
Yes, Tasmania is beautiful and interesting, and the people we met were delightful, but there is a dark background to all this beauty that you can’t, or shouldn’t, try to escape. Most people are aware that Australia started life as a penal colony, where (mostly) the poor and unconnected were shipped for (mostly) trivial crimes.…
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The Beautiful Side of Tasmania
Most of my life I had no idea where Tasmania was, much less any thoughts about going there. In my ignorance I had thought it was somewhere in, or off the coast of Africa — mostly a jungle full of weird animals. But in late 2009, I ended up with two very smart software developers…
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