The Monday Read

Has Now Left the Building Edition

I’ve been working at a national university in Sendai for the last thirteen years, but my contract is up at the end of this month. In a few days time I will no longer be a well-paid public servant 😉

It was a very mixed experience, but I am very glad I had the opportunity to work there and I learned an enormous amount. I’m also happy to be moving on now.

You can read more about my experiences there over on my personal/teaching blog.

The Forum

The Forum just passed 20,000 posts 🙂

Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

Still working my way through rereading the Reacher series. Finished Bad Luck and Trouble, which is a good one, and also picked up Seth Godin’s The Practice.

This week’s links

1. Another shockingly innumerate whining article: Middle-class life today is a struggle with poverty
2. Bonds? Or no? Is Warren Buffet’s View on Bonds Making You Think Twice?
3. More renewables, more efficiency please: Japan’s power crisis was a decade in the making and won’t go away
4. This Twitter thread explains what happens when you use an international driving license in Japan for more than one year.
5. Most expensive stock market in history? (YouTube) Who can afford the S&P 500? | Chart of the Week
6. Ouch, ouch: ¥/$ May Be Heading to ¥125
7. Electricity generation in Japan is in a state: Guilty as charged
8. Just keep at it: Get rich doing anything
9. A good question: Why is Japan so cheap?
10. Possibly a good thing: Flurry of asset sales in Japan as firms hit by Covid-19 shore up books
11. Surely this is a win-win: The future of energy will require citizens to make sacrifices. Just ask Tokyo residents
12. I hope this (or something like it) becomes commercially viable soon: Disruptive Drilling Technology To Help Geothermal Power The World
13. Strangely popular: Investing in Japan: Getting by on “Yuutai”
14. Huge fan of this approach: Energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins: ‘It’s the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest way to address the crisis’
15. Reckon this would also work for non-teachers: How To Be A Better, Calmer Teacher With Visualization

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

The Monday Read, going out to more than 2,560 subscribers each week. Please share this post/email with friends/colleagues who may be interested in it.

If you were forwarded the email you can sign up to the list here.