Original in Spanish: 2026-09-08 - En qué ando
In 1998 Honduras opened a bridge designed to withstand hurricanes. That same year the hurricane came. The bridge held up perfectly and lost the river.
Seriously.
I’ll remember this photo the next time I think I need something
The bridge above exists and it’s called the Choluteca Bridge. The river carved itself a new bed and started flowing NEXT to it. The wrong problem, solved flawlessly: the requirement said “survive the hurricane” and nobody asked what the river was going to do.
Bombed Bikini
In 1946 the United States asked the 167 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll to leave “temporarily”, for the good of mankind. Eighty years later they still can’t go back. It’s all in The exiles of Bikini Atoll: the bomb that came out two and a half times bigger than calculated, the return that ended terribly, and compensation that has never been paid.
That’s where the swimsuit gets its name.
Make love
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman F. Dixon. Why supposedly well-commanded armies stumble again and again into disasters everyone saw coming. It’s made me really want to go hippie.
A case in point
Balaclava, 1854. An ambiguous order, every officer seeing that charging down that valley was madness, nobody daring to question it, and some 600 horsemen charging head-on into the Russian artillery and getting smashed to pieces because their bosses woke up that day wanting to measure theirs.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Theirs but to do and die. Lately picking on hierarchies is very much my thing. Ego is such a nasty thing.
Hidden gem
The Femme Urge, Malti’s blog: in Spanish, at whatever pace life allows her, by email or RSS and with no algorithm, which is sort of the point. I found it through Ama la música, odia Spotify, which does both halves, the why of leaving and the how.
Three questions I’m taking with me
From Daniel Pink, the Drive guy. They’re in Questions to be a better thinker: cheap to ask, annoying to skip, and all three point at the same place, your own certainty.
I’m fine and all that…