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Fascinating evening with Thomas Ermacora and the Recode the City Symposium at LimeWharf, alongside Regent’s Canal. After an intriguing telecon with an interesting part of the Government and a Social Stock Exchange Board meeting in Michelin House, I arrived minutes before I was due to go on stage, with Thomas and Professor Daniel Charny, of From Now On, Fixperts, and the Maker Library Network.

A strong sense of overlapping universes as we discuss the Maker, Biomimicry, City and Sustainability worlds, among others. Good material for my upcoming city-focused keynotes at Bristol City Leadership Summit and baseEUcities.

It was particularly intriguing to catch the end of an online interview with Jonathan Knowles of Autodesk and to meet people like Tomas Diez of FabLab Barcelona. Evening also saw the pre-launch of Recoded City: Co-Creating Urban Futures, a book by Thomas Ermacora and Lucy Bullivant.

I came away with an even greater appetite to explore the intersections across this emerging multiverse of ours. For more info, follow Thomas Ermacora on Twitter at: @termacora.

A week of rattling around this city of ours, with an extraordinary evening at the Science Museum (already covered), a lunch at the Great Court Restaurant in the British Museum with Susanne Stormer of Novo Nordisk, an evening at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (an Adopt-a-Book event with suggested old books covering such things as scurvy, vaccinations, with marginalia protesting the use of vaccinations inserted by someone from the anti-vaccination movement, or somesuch), a wonderful dinner at Morden & Lea with Elaine, Gaia, Paul and Kate Pocock, and a trip across to Highbury & Islington yesterday to see Anthea and Richard Nicholson – reading The Martian en route, a gift from Jim Salzman earlier in the week.

Still on a medical note, read in The Times on 10 September that a study of more than 700,000 Swedish men between 1958 and 1991 (all of whom had their resting heartbeat measured when they were conscripted for national service) had concluded that those with a low resting heartbeat at age 18 were almost 50% more likely to be convicted later life for assault, murder, kidnapping or rape.

They were also a third more likely to suffer unintentional injures from cases such as traffic accidents.

Given that I have had a very low resting heartbeat for as long as I can remember, the fact that I have had a series of accidents as a cyclist and as a pedestrian is no longer quite so surprising – even if I escaped the duresses of national service, which officially ended here in 1960 (when I would have been 11), with the last conscripts leaving service in 1963.

The researchers speculate that these heightened risks reflected the fact that those committing violent crime – and those who experienced raised levels of accidents – were relatively fearless.

One ethical question raised by the research: should courts accept a low resting heartbeat as a mitigating factor for the commission of serious violence? I hope I don’t have the opportunity it put it to the test …

 

Utter joy this evening to be at the Science Museum with Elaine, Gaia, Hania and Paul for the ‘grand opening’ of the new Cosmonauts: The Birth of the Space Age exhibition. And it truly was grand, spine-tingling. Complete rapture to hear Valentina Tereshkova speak, alongside people like Helen Sharman and Olga Golodets, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian federation, who did so much to make the exhibition happen.

Science Museum Director Ian Blatchford did us all proud by speaking extensively in Russian.

The speeches were heralded by the Festive Overture by Shostakovich, and concluded with an extract from The Mlada Suite by Rimsky-Korsakov. Glorious music, with a sense of a Russian Star Wars score. Found ourselves standing alongside Michael Grade and Jeffrey Archer, with Dame Mary Archer onstage, as Chairman of the Science Museum.

Struggled a bit with BP CEO Bob Dudley being up there as main funder. He noted that while the cosmonauts had explored upwards, he and BP had explored downwards. But, given that the cosmonauts and astronauts gave us such a powerful sense of the uniqueness of our small planet, it would be great if companies like BP could behave as if they meant to stay here – rather than shooting off into space, leaving wrack and ruin in their wake.

As we were offered terrestrial delights like Aviator vodka along with Russian potato and pink radish salad in mouli cups, and vodka and dill cured salmon, sour cream and pumpernickel, I spared a though for the Soviet populace that laboured on Earth while a small coterie (of incredibly brave people) were launched into space.

The highlight of the exhibition, for me at least, was the space-suit for a dogonaut. Poor beast. As to legitimacy of some of the photographs here, hmmm. I had asked a security guard if it was OK if I used camera without flash, and he said it was. The images shown are those taken before he came around later on to tell me it was not allowed …

Mental note to send a message to Jerry Linenger, a member of our Advisory Board (see his comment below), who was both an Astronaut and a Cosmonaut, and spent five months on the Mir space station. What these people did beggars the imagination, but set the scene for the modern environmental and sustainability movements.

In a recent interview for Bosch, I discuss progress with the Triple Bottom Line and the ESG agenda here.

 

Delighted that the Shared Value Initiative posted my ‘We All Want To Change The World‘ blog today, the first tine we have publicly trailed our new Breakthrough Compass. Something I originally sketched out on the kitchen table, using kitchen implements, before flying to Mexico City for a session with Grupo Bimbo CEO Daniel Servitjes.