The root of the word sustenance is the same as the word sustain: from the Latin sustinere, to hold up.
Sustainability is a big deal where we are right now. For example, the thermostat in our room is capped at 23*c. That's like 73 in my real world. Perfectly fine except when the room is much cooler and you'd like it to warm up quickly.
The Dean's Welcome last evening was all about excellence and helping others to be excellent. And sustainability. To that end we partook in a sustainable meal of vegan salad. We had two choices of vegan salad. The dressing on the one I chose was quite good. Sustain!
Stopped in at the wurst place on the way back to the room for some sustenance.
As I count, there are 15 invited keynote speakers, and a like number of poster presenters, from out of the country. They have arrived here mostly by plane, though a few by train. Furthest away is a fellow from South Africa, a 15 hour flight. I think we are next at a total flying time of 12 hours. Closest would be from Sweden, about a one hour flight. Doesn't seem right to use an average of the end points, so we'll go with a seat of the pants calculation that the average flight time for those 30 out of country participants is 2.5 hours. Times 30 gives us 75 hours of flying.
it would take a bunch of conversions to figure out how much fuel was consumed to get these people here, especially since you'd have to figure out the average fuel per person, and I'm not going to do that. My point is that the our little sacrifice of eating a salad pales in comparison to bringing 30 people to Helsinki.
Not that I'm complaining. This is not a bad place to visit. The food is good! This evening we go to a Traditional Finnish Restaurant. I won't be having reindeer because I've already had the best reindeer possible. I don't think I posted the photo of the reindeer and mashed potatoes, did I?
Some other time.
In news, my iPad is messing up every which way. So excuse typos, formatting, etc.
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