Ewan's Cycling Blog

The last day started badly but ended with a lovely surprise. Since this is the last blog for the trip, it'll be the usual random stuff interspersed with incredibly boring pictures of Swedish roads but…followed by some overall thoughts about the trip. Last night the weather forecast started to converge on rain in the morning and when I woke up it was pretty accurate. More rain. Summer in Sweden. I couldn't really face one more Swedish breakfast so I overdosed on coffee while waiting for the rain to turn to drizzle. Drizzle was the best I was going to get and there was nothing for it but to get on the bike and get wet. Nyköping's quite quaint central section turned into the, now familiar, hinterlands of identikit apartment blocks and power tool stores. Like the other towns. Wet and boring. After Nyköping petered out, it was back to the usual endless and ...

As I travel from <something>köping to <another>köping, it may help to know that köping is pronounced “choping” and it means “market”. So Nyköping is effectively Newmarket. Today was, in the end, a good day. Also, today's post is a bit longer than normal because it was a short cycling day. Unfortunately, the distribution of Swedish towns big enough to have hotels is such that today was going to have to be a short day. I could either do one 210km day (yeah, right) or an 80km day and a 130km day. As you will have seen from yesterday's post, according to the Economist, weather forecasting is now super accurate — for some definition of accurate. There seemed to be a window between 6am and 11am where it was going to be dry and that it would be sunny in Nyköping when I arrived. I woke at 5.30am (<sigh>) and looked out of my window at a beautiful morning. Ri...

In the comments on yesterday's blog, Robert pointed me to a great article in the Economist (which I had missed) on the Dutch, Norwegians and Swedish trying to reclaim their language especially in the scientific sphere. It's a nice idea but they're doomed to failure. There was a time 100 years ago where non-English words could make it in technical fields ( bremsstrahlung, eigenvector for example) but the dominance of the USA in science means those days are gone. The language of STEM is English and so, in many ways, it's the language of the future and even more so with the importance of computer science. The difficult problem comes when you consider languages like Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese or (maybe) Chinese. These are in no sense “minority” languages. Many of them have more native speakers than English. However the corpus of technical language in each o...