Posts by Bruce Grierson
“I’m On The Bus”: How a rookie finished an Ironman
Maddy Williams came up with a novel mind hack to get through one of the most challenging days of her life. She broke up The Victoria Ironman 70.3 – an epic 113-km-long triathlon – into a series of Nows. In each of those Nows, she told herself was simply “on the bus.”
When you’re on a bus you are, in a sense, free and clear. There are no meaningful decisions to make, there’s no way out and no turning back. The bus is going where it’s going. Your job is just to ride it.
Read MoreEureka Travel
My father-in-law had just wrapped up his postdoc work and he and my mother-in-law had gone to Europe to celebrate. He was a doctor now. But he had no idea what kind of doctor he wanted to be. Should he specialize? If so, in what? The couple were in Italy, not far from Pisa. Bob…
Read MoreFirst Day Best Day
It is without doubt your biggest day ever. And you don’t remember a single second of it. No, you weren’t blackout drunk. You were freshly hatched. That’s why you have no memory of Day One on the Job of Being Alive on Planet Earth: your brain wasn’t developed enough to form memories. So it’s fun,…
Read MoreGo and Do It
The best thing about full-time magazine writing was the shoeleather reporting. It got me away from the computer and out into the wild. But as the magazine industry shrank to what it is now, that kind of journalism stopped getting funded. Magazines – the ones that are left – still need words, but they have…
Read MoreA sacred pause in the carnage
As the Winter Olympics open in Milan/Cortina, an acquaintance reminded me that this would be a good time for humans to push pause on war. That’s what happened in ancient Greece. The bi-annual Olympic Games were such a big deal that all the warring city-states called a truce: everyone downed swords and went to watch…
Read More“You become who you know and where you go.”
As the New Year dawns, I find this quote stuck in my head. Which means it’s worth posting about. We’ve all heard of Dunbar’s Number, the number of people you can have in your life, or at least the number you know well enough to call a friend. It’s around 150. That was the case…
Read MoreLive in a way that confuses AI
Large Language Models work by guessing what you’re going to say next. That’s their job. AI is a prediction machine, like the human brain itself. You may have noticed: it’s getting pretty good at this. But wait, you’re thinking: Chat GPT doesn’t even know me! That’s true. But what it knows is … us. It…
Read MoreA day in full
Craig Mod has maybe a different idea from the rest of us about what constitutes a “full” day. To him, it basically means putting in the miles. On foot. All. Day. Long. Mod is Homo Ambulans: Walking Man. A human defined by, and increasingly well known for, the epic strolls he takes and writes about…
Read MoreLest Lee Forget
This is an accidental Big Day. Accidental because its subject, Lee Miller – one of the most important war photographers of the 20th century – was unknown to me a week ago. But our excellent local art gallery, the Polygon, had just opened a big show of her work. The keeper of the Lee Miller…
Read MoreFrozen Frenzy: dream day for hockey junkies
I will confess that watching TV for eight straight hours would not be my own choice for a Big Day (though we did do it once – in our defense, it was during Covid). But I appreciate that someone thought up Frozen Frenzy, and made it happen – yesterday. As a result, a particular kind…
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