Remember my wife’s post on TED?

Well, a couple of days ago TED released the latest talk from Hans Rosling… Another great one, both content-wise and for the way it is delivered. Enjoy!

…or you will get burned!

I do not know how many times I heard this phrase from my parents. I never played with fire, yet I got burned many times! Eventually, I never  learned how to start a fire and unfortunately neither how to put it off.

The only rule that I was taught early on was never to use water when putting out oil fires. This is of course a very useful rule. Here is a small demonstration just as a reminder:

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What do you get when you put together a spring sunny day, some community spirit, conservation of embodied energy, plenty of kids and the pleasure to get rid of stuff you don’t need any more? A loppis! (which shorthand for loppmarknad, the Swedish word for flea market).

Admittedly, I have marginal experience with flea markets around the world, yet in most of the countries in which I happened to visit loppis, I noticed that the majority of people selling stuff were professional second-hand dealers, and a relevant portion of the customers were experienced “flea market hoppers” looking for a specific item (such a particular reprint of a book, or a specific recording of a song on vinyl) or in search of some good deal.

This is not the case with Swedish loppis, though. And most definitively not for the loppis we visited today. Here’s a bullet-point list of the things that make Swedish loppis one of the many things I love of this country: Read the rest of this entry »