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RtW Cities: Rome (+ Florence)

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Travelling over the winter mostly slowed down due to skiing instead, so this is the first round-the-world cities post in a while. Other travels in that time included a trip home to Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide - maybe I should add them to the series?) and London (already written up), but otherwise, just sticking within Switzerland. Anyway, to Rome (via Florence). Florence had been recommended by family as a good place to visit, and as it lies between Rome and Switzerland, it seemed a worthwhile place to add a stopover on our trip. Arriving pretty late on a Thursday night, we only got sneak peaks of all the fancy buildings on the way to the hotel ; which turned out to be interesting, it appeared to have only just opened (i.e. still under construction, although not near the rooms) and the walk up the stairs to our room past a giant old fresco was a good reminder we were in Italy. After a good half-hour introduction from the extremely friendly Cesare, and a quick peek o

MOOC^3

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Hey all - in case you're curious at what's been occupying my time recently: www.coursera.org In particular, while in Zurich I've been filling a bunch of my spare evenings and weekends with some online courses. While I spend most of my day doing computer-science-y stuff (or, I guess 'software engineering' to be more exact), I feel the amount of new stuff that I'm learning now is pretty limited and there's only so much coding I can do before wanting to learn something else... so while my first was a programming course (Scala), the remainder have been a mixture of economics (Economics for Scientists, Competitive Strategy, Advanced Game Theory), med (Computational Neuroscience, Diabetes: Diagnosis, Treatment and Opportunities) and psychology (Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour, Social Psychology, Moralities of Everyday Life). In particular though, three of those courses mentioned above (Comp Neuro, Game Theory, Moralities) were all offered at the s