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Independent Singapore
06-05-2025
- Independent Singapore
Yes, it's theoretically possible to travel from Europe to Singapore by train, but you may not want to
Reddit screengrab/u/htGoSEVe SINGAPORE: In this day and age of uncomfortable flights, delays, lost luggage, and the other inconveniences of modern air travel, not to mention its cost to the environment, we can understand why someone would dream of a long and scenic train journey instead. Believe it or not, it's actually possible to travel from Lagos, a town in southern Portugal, to Singapore . The journey is 18,755 kilometers, crosses eight time zones and 13 countries, and takes around 14 days in all. It spans 13 countries in total, including Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, meaning travelers would experience multiple landscapes and cultures. Photo: Freepik/jcomp However, it is not a continuous train ride, mainly due to national borders. Of course, travellers would need to hop off and then hop on several train lines, as well as even walk or take a cab or three from one train station to another, to complete the journey, especially since there is a 15-km gap in the rail line in Laos. According to travellers would have to change trains a total of 20 times. Unfortunately, at the moment, the longest train ride in the world remains in the theoretical realm, in large part due to several concerns. First came the COVID-19 pandemic and all the shutdowns it entailed, and then came Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which made traveling by train between Russia and other parts of Europe impossible. This effectively shuts out the 7,622 km trip that takes travellers from Europe (Moscow) to Asia (Beijing). While train services are still running, although in a limited capacity, getting into Moscow to secure a seat is the challenge. However, assuming a traveller could do so, once in Beijing, they could board a train to Vientiane (Laos), then go on to Bangkok, then Kuala Lumpur, and then finally to Singapore. Photo: Freepik/pressfoto How much would such an epic tour cost? Experts have estimated that the whole journey will set a traveler back between €1000 and €1500 (S$1460 to S$2200). Meanwhile, a flight from Portugal to Singapore can be found for as low as S$1000. To sum it all up, with global tensions heightened as they are, maybe now really is not the best time for such a lengthy train journey, romantic as it sounds, but still, we can dream, can't we? /TISG Read also: Top 10 must-see travel destinations every Singaporean must-have on their bucket list
Telegraph
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
This viral critic of the Davos elite is both admirable and annoying
The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman is best known as a gadfly to the global elite. He went viral online in 2019 when, speaking on stage at Davos, he criticised attendees of the World Economic Forum for avoiding tax and taking private jets to Switzerland to listen to Sir David Attenborough talk about climate change. When Tucker Carlson then invited him on Fox News, Bregman pointed out that his host was 'a millionaire funded by billionaires'. Carlson insulted him and pulled the segment. Bregman's own recording of that exchange went viral too. Bregman's first book was Utopia for Realists (2017), which argued in favour of universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek, and was buoyed by a popular TED talk on poverty. Humankind: A Hopeful History, a feelgood book out in 2020 – when readers were desperate to feel good – argued that human beings are, at heart, A-OK. Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, translated from Dutch by Erica Moore, offers something of a corrective to that optimism, or at least the brand of optimism that's laced with complacency. Bregman told Big Think magazine last year that he saw 'influencers reading Humankind [who] started posting: 'My faith in humanity is completely restored. I'm going to work less and just enjoy my life.'' It alarmed him: 'I felt I had created a monster.' The cold water he douses on readers of Moral Ambition, as its subtitle implies, is an injunction: don't just stand there, do something. Bregman faults his fellow progressives for armchair activism, citing the ineffectiveness of contemporary protest movements such as Occupy compared to the coordinated efforts, say, of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. He also urges activists to set aside differences if they want to reach bigger goals. Coalition-building requires compromise; otherwise, he warns, 'you end up with a movement that's 100 per cent pure, but zero per cent effective.' Bregman urges educated professionals to move away from what the anthropologist David Graeber dubbed 'bulls--t jobs', in fields such as consultancy, and instead to pursue socially meaningful work. 'Of all things wasted in our throwaway times,' Bregman writes, 'the greatest is wasted talent.' He highlights the paths of altruists such as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, the civil-rights activist Rosa Parks, and Rob Mather, founder of a malaria-fighting charity. Some of the case studies are instructive at the everyday scale: people, we learn, are more likely to help when they're directly asked. Bregman's ambitions are admirable. If even a small percentage of those who pick up this book are spurred to action, whether that's a charity run or a complete change in career, it's hard to disagree that it will have been worth his effort. (The idea resonated personally: I left what he would consider a bulls--t job in investment banking to write a book about the future of seduction that I hoped readers would find helpful.) The delivery of the message, however, is irksome. Bregman, the son of a pastor, is too susceptible to sermonising, and like most pop philosophy-history-psychology writers in the Malcolm Gladwell mould, he's prone to hyperbole and gross oversimplification. Twenty-five years after Gladwell's The Tipping Point, the Big Ideas genre continues to sell healthily – especially to a type the writer Gavin Jacobson has dubbed 'Waterstones Dad' – but its formula of anecdotes and simplistic diagrams isn't ageing well. Bregman opens his book by making the curious choice to upbraid a Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard, whose brain activity in an MRI scan saw him branded 'the happiest man in the world'. Bregman's beef with Ricard, formerly a molecular geneticist who researched colonic bacteria, is that he had ditched the Institut Pasteur in Paris for a monastic life in Tibet, thereby depriving the world of his potential contribution to science. (He somewhat redeems himself in Bregman's eyes by later setting up a nonprofit.) Yet Ricard is also a bestselling author, having written books on altruism, happiness, meditation and animal rights, and translated numerous Buddhist texts. When you consider that Bregman is telling us all this in a book of his own, and the ripple effects of books are not quantifiable anyway, you wonder: who's to say whether Bregman or Ricard has the greater moral ambition?
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Huge orange star above Earth could explode at any moment
Humanity may be about to experience the first supernova visible to the naked eye in over 400 years, as a supergiant star appears to be close to exploding. Not one to be overshadowed by 'trade wars', actual wars and asteroids which were but now aren't a threat to Earth; it would appear one of the stars in the night sky may now be gearing up for a colossal cosmic event. According to astronomers, the Betelgeuse red supergiant star, appears to be on its last legs due to its increasingly volatile behaviour in the past couple of years. Situated in the Orion constellation, Betelgeuse is noticeable in the night sky thanks to its orange glow. However this may not be the case for much longer. Back in 2019, NASA noted that Betelgeuse's brightness dimmed by about 60%, leading some scientists to wonder if it was entering a 'pre-supernova' phase, an event later explained as a a surface mass ejection. Fast forward four years and the star would begin acting up once again, with The Guardian explaining that Betelgeuse was glowing and dimming at 'twice as fast as usual', and in 2024 the American Association of Variable Star Observers revealed how the star had dimmed by 0.5 in the opening months of the year. So, what's going on? Well it's a bit of a good news/bad news situation on that front. It's impossible to predict exactly when the star will explode, however, scientists predict Betelgeuse will enter into a supernova anywhere within the next 10,000 to 100,000 years. Which means you could very well look out your window tomorrow and witness a supernova — or this could happen on any of the other 99,999 years. "We conclude that Betelgeuse is... a good candidate for the next galactic supernova," wrote the authors of one study, which predicted it could be in as little as 'tens of years'. EarthSky adds that Betelgeuse is also between 430 light-years and 643 light-years away from Earth, so we wouldn't see it immediately. For those who can vaguely recall their school science lessons, the death of a star is marked by an explosion, which ejects gas and various matter into the galaxy, before it collapses into a black hole. Which would be very bad news — if the star was close enough to impact Earth. Fortunately, this isn't the case with Betelgeuse. Given that we're at a safe enough distance, astronomers are excited by the prospect of witnessing the Betelgeuse supernova. According to Big Think, the exploding star would 'shine approximately as brightly as the full Moon' and reach maximum brightness after around '10 days.'
