The Main Trunk line is a railway running through the middle of the North Island connecting Wellington and Auckland. It was finished in 1908 and became the preferred way to travel between the two cities. Car and aircraft have since superseded rail for personal travel, but the Main Trunk is still used for transporting dairy, minerals, and wood. The Northern Explorer is a scenic train service which runs on the same line. I recently took the 11 hour journey from Wellington to Auckland.

This year I’ve been exploring the field of Resilience Engineering. Resilience Engineering is concerned with building complex systems that are resilient to change and disruption. I’m interested in how we can understand and reason with complex systems. Here I write what I’ve learned so far, and how we can apply it. Most of the ideas I discuss here are proposed by Dr Richard Cook, John Allspaw, and Prof David D. Woods.

History was like that - a negative at which one was the print, the positive. He thought: People are not separate individuals as they think, they are variations on themes outside themselves … The lost remain the lost, the found the found

The Avignon Quintet are a collection of novels written by Lawrence Durrell between 1974 and 1985. The novels cover a range of topics including personal identity, sexuality, ideology, love, the scientific method, and free will. Durrell writes with an …

I recently read Nature - The Seductive Myth of Nature’s Goodness by Alan Levinovitz. The book looks at the word nature and all of the meanings we’ve given it. The term nature is used in a lot of domains - food, the outdoors, makeup, medicine, philosophy, and even economics.

Levinovitz explores an example around vanilla essence. If we saw a bottle of Natural Vanilla Essence in the supermarket how do we …

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope …