463 cases of female genital mutilation are identified in English hospitals every month. (The Sunday Times) Despite the fact that it is illegal, it has been estimated that over 20,000 girls under the age of 15 are at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK each year, and that 66,000 women in the …
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination spans the world”. Albert Einstein
I am not normally in the business of reviewing movies, but I found “The Imitation Game” particularly moving. If you don’t know about it, it is about Alan Turing, logician and cryptologist and one of the 20th Century’s outstanding geniuses. He and his team cracked the Nazi naval Enigma Code during the Second World War, …
The Pope recently announced that he thought Darwin’s theory of evolution was correct and that the universe was created as a result of the Big Bang. Educated, intelligent people who are religious wouldn’t argue with this (my sister, who regards herself as a born-again christian, sees nothing in science that contradicts her beliefs. Indeed, she …
The Abbasid Caliphs Mamum and Mutasim, who ruled in the 9th Century, established a group of scholars who believed that “God, while beyond the imagination of humans to imagine or define, nevertheless existed within the framework of rational thought”. In other words, they did not simply accept the Koran but subjected it to argument and …
Lucretius, who lived in the 1st Century BCE, wrote in his famous poem de Rerum Natura a powerful diatribe against creationism and intelligent design. Fear of the gods, he said was inconsistent with civilised life. Science provides the explanations for natural phenomena. The poem supports Epicurean atomism, physics, theology and other points of doctrine. Stephen …
Epicurus would probably have said that education is the most important gift you can give a child, along with self-discipline. Forgive me for repeating something I recently wrote, but it is so important that it bears repeating – frequently! Many people seem to think that schools and universities have to train you for a job. …
Continue reading ‘Education : No. 4 in the list of Gross National Happiness criteria’ »
US law curiously states that the air above our heads is public above 500 feet and that individuals own the air space above their homes up to 83 feet. So who owns the space between the 83 feet and the 500 feet? The Federal Aviation Administration is currently regulating it in the cause of public …
Continue reading ‘Dogfights in the sky: the future of drone delivery’ »
We could end up living “the bad dream of an economy in which robots do all the production, including the production of robots”, says the 1987 Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow. People may become better at emotional skills – the one realm where they might out-compete robots – but face-to-face interaction may continue to lose …
The grammar-hammers are at it again, this time trying to abolish the comma. People intent on tearing apart the language, word by word, hyphen by hyphen, cannot see the importance of correct grammar, maybe because they have never learned it? The poet, Geoffrey Hill, highlighted a typical and subtle example of the value of the …
In a review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book “The Sixth Extinction” the reviewer, Michael S. Roth, says that “We have entered an era in which human beings have begun to change everything about the planet’s interlocking ecosystems, and we have put many of those systems and our own species at enormous risk.” We have been bad …
21% of British adults say they support paying extra for goods and services to help deal with climate change. 72% admit that their own standard of living is more important to them than helping to solve problems caused by climate change. (RSA/The Times) To suggest that you can throw all that gunk into the atmosphere …
Continue reading ‘Do you do anything about climate change ?’ »
Essentially, every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies are made of stardust. (from “A Universe from Nothing” by Lawrence m. Krauss). I …
The British Cohort Study, conducted by academics at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, used information from two UK studies from 1958 (4,267 men and 4,537 women) and 1970 (3,412 men and 3,658 women), assessing intelligence at age 10 and 11, and then asking political questions at the age of 33. The study claims that there …
Continue reading ‘Do right-wingers have less innate intelligence than left-wingers?’ »
The discovery of a cheap and almost absurdly simple way of making stem cells – the “master” cells that can develop into any tissue – could lead to a new era of “personalised” medicine. The breakthrough was made by a young researcher in Japan, who found that blood cells from mice could be turned back …
