22 January 2016 478 words, 2 min. read

Good resolution #2: enjoy my old passions

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
To follow up on my latest blog post on good resolutions for the year 2016, here’s part 2: my second set of good resolutions. I’ve a few passions in life that need to be awaken. I put them aside many […]

To follow up on my latest blog post on good resolutions for the year 2016, here’s part 2: my second set of good resolutions. I’ve a few passions in life that need to be awaken. I put them aside many years while doing my PhD. Time to enjoy them again in 2016.

Mineralogy

Few of my friends and acquaintances that I actually started my “career” in a totally different field. Before shifting to marketing and social science and earning a PhD in Economics, I was actually more into “hard science”. When I was  child I developed a passion for Earth Sciences in general and mineralogy in particular, authored several articles in international journals (US, UK, Australia and even Russia), was one of 6 correspondents in the world for The Mineralogical Record, and even contributed to the creation of a magazine on mineralogy in French in the 90’s.

My mineralogical collection has been stored in boxed for years. It’s now time to discover all these beauties and catch up with the market and the latest novelties.

Old and rare books

My passion for minerals brought me to collecting old books on mineralogy and crystallography. Those two sciences are pretty “new” (ca. 200 years) and there is a rich literature to collect on this topic. Fortunately I was still looking for books during my “idle” period (i.e. the last 10 years) and the books I acquired during this period are just sitting on the shelves to be read. On my quest to finding rare 18th century books in particular, I discovered that the market conditions for antiquarian books had dramatically changed in Italy recently. A new law was passed that forbids to export books older than 50 years (whatever the value and the country, even within the EU) without an license for exportation. If you read Italian don’t miss this article to discover what happened.

Rather than spending money on “Made in China” products and the things that will get broken after a while, I’ll rather invest a few bucks in those old books which just await to be preserved and re-discovered. Old books will survive me; “Made in China” stuffs won’t. Recently I started thinking about how to pass on memories of me to my son.

Old-timer

The mid-life crisis is approaching (or is it already there?) … won’t it be the best moment to finally buy this BMW 635 Csi (the old one, not the new one!) I’ve dreamt about for years? The only little issue I’ve to solve is to find someone to help me cherry-pick the right exemplar. I’ve no mechanics skills at all and when buying a 25-year car one should be special attention to some aspects that are totally outside of my field of competence. I need to get advised by someone who does know old-timers very well, and the 635 csi in particular. If you know one, just drop me a line.



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