Spent my birthday ticking “run a marathon” off the bucket list. This photo is me at my “I need to lie down, please pour water over me” stage after finishing. El scorchio in London today! ☀️☀️☀️ Thanks for all the birthday wishes! Also thanks to @jazz_ali for the training inspiration, and @aaronpatrick28 @gordon & @jrgoolia for the support & beer afterwards!

Added another touch of spring to the flat 🌱🌸🌵

♥️ Bruntsfield

Lovely time of year to be out for a run!

This was a pretty good book - history of pictures through drawing, painting, photography and cinema. It’s presented as a conversation between Hockney and Gayford, so you get a good idea of both the history, but also the reaction to it. What is important, what is interesting, and what influenced later artists.

Nice wee bike ride out through Cramond, the Dalmeny Estate to the foot of the Forth bridges. #cycling #scotland

Spring is springing 🌱☀️

A good read. A narrative on history, geography, competing cultures and models. With Brexit on the horizon, USA changing its foreign stance, Russia asserting itself, and China rising, this provides a lot of thinking material.

#reading #bookstagram

25km out to Musselburgh and along to Portobello, home via Holyrood Park. Sore legs now!

Faves at @productforge - @lockhartl @mrtomyoull

Nice catch up with Euan pre-hackathon. Looking forward to seeing the teams and other mentors over the weekend. 🙌

#generationrent @productforge

Wee day trip to Stirling for some work. Lovely fresh day!☀️

Spring, trying its best in the Meadows

👋@alasdair_h

Just finished this beast. If you are interested in history, the USA and spending a lot of time reading… It’s good! Fascinating to see how quickly the US changed, and the factions and paradoxes at the heart of the American project.

Paired up with Albion’s Seed, American Nations and the Revolutions podcast, I’m learning a lot about history over the past few months.

21km rainy run through Morningside, Duddingston, Arthur’s Seat and the Meadows. Phew!

Not going to lie, I had a great time reliving my youth (adulthood) at Hell is For Heroes. Mind that time they made the perfect album 🤟👌@the_vonz @laurakane @jazz_ali @sadieohades

Sunday run day 🏃

Trying to read more fiction this year. This was a good story of Koreans in Japan - ethnicity, history and belonging over the twentieth century. Worth picking up. 📙

Beautiful brisk morning cycle out to Cramond. 🚲

Finished Principles by Ray Dalio (yet again I have a new years resolution to read more). An interesting book overall.

Some of the material reminded me of the ideas in “average is over” - where people and firms encode their knowledge into models, then use the machine answers to illuminate or help their decision making. This is probably something we’ll see more of with big data / org telemetry.

That said, much of this book is already available in free PDFs and articles by Dalio, and it did get a little repetitive (down into policy from principles). I’d love to hear about the workings of Bridgewater from other employees, to get a feel for how these ideas work in practice.

#book 📙