Countries I've been to...

21 countries, all in Europe...

Longest stay:
Finland - 11 months
UK - 9 months
Romania - 2 months, coming up!

Shortest stay:
Macedonia - 2 hours
Norway - 3 hours
Serbia - 6 hours

Farthest point from home:
Skibotn / Norway
Malaga / Spain
Inverness / Scotland-UK

Academic inflation

TEDtalks - Sir Ken Robinson

Through different channels... I ended up to watch this video/speech...
In this Mr Robinson mentioned the phrase: academic inflation.

I tried to google around, but all I found was about money and investment in education. Though, what Mr Robinson meant, was more about all academic knowledge and, therefore, that is represented by - degree, diploma - looses its value by the time.
It was funny to hear when he said: young people with degrees just go home and continue playing video games... /Just like my brother.../
The other thing that was interesting was that the whole educational system is built in a way to serve the goal of educating people to become university professors.

The other interesting question is about memory... what is it? where is it?
How, when, where all our memories are stored?

Quote of week 33

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Quote of the week

I just noticed I haven't posted quotes for long time :(
Time to catch up... and this one really fits to my mood. I felt the first half until I read it.
But now...
Great to have some sentences like this around :)

"When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile"

Autism

A bit of knowledge I gained in Finland.

Pepez's nephew, Konsta around 2 year old, is autist. The first time I heard about autism was from the movie Rain Man. And the only thing that got me was that it has something to do with numbers and numeric skills, but lack of social skills.

Since then I met Konsta. Pepez told me some things before our first visit to his brother's. But I didn't really know what to expect.

I wanted to get to know more about this "disease". Unfortunatelly, our communication with the mother, Marianne, is quite limited. Since she doesn't really speak english and I am not too good at finnish either. So, if Pepez is not there to translate we are quite hopeless.

But I can observe and follow Konsta's behaviour... even if for a short time every now and then.

Marianne, who is a nurse by the way, told me they were lucky. They realized it very early and could start treatment instantly. She also told me that autism has many different forms. So every autist needs personalized care.

To be continued...