A few weeks into the coronavirus outbreak, and I’m affected. No, I haven’t caught the damn thing – luckily – but I’ll have to face the prospect, sooner or later, of running out of facemasks for my dental practice. Thanks to panic buying – even colleagues have been stocking up, it seems – my dental […]
Science
The Death Of Venice
Many of you, like myself, are guilty. We are guilty of having visited a sick but beautiful city. We have been at the bedside of a dying patient and have done nothing to cure her of illness. She is slowly slipping away, without a sound, accepting that her fate is sealed. She answers to the […]
A Pi In The Sky – 3.14 And A Few More Decimals
I was never much good at maths. In fact, to this day, I will never come to terms with 10 minutes of nightmare that I went through during a maths test. I was about 10 at the time, but I remember every single moment of having to admit to the whole class that I was […]
- Biology
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How To Destroy A Human Brain
It’s a story I missed, but having now seen it, I cannot leave it untouched. It represents, on its own, all that is magnificent and evil about human existence – the magnificence of giving life to another, and the evil of taking part of that same life away. In November last year, a French court […]
Communicating Beyond Beauty (1) – The Whale Song
What if you could write a love song for a whale, and an orchestra went out into the ocean to play it? As you listen, you can see the spectrogram of a beautiful humpback whale song from deep in the Monterey Bay. These […]
- Psychology
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The Case Against Evolutionary Psychology – When Science Forgets Morality
I’ve had a brief encounter with the world of evolutionary psychology, by posting my last piece in a Facebook group baring the same name. It was accepted by a moderator but not, it seems, by the group’s members. Maybe they didn’t like the way I criticized psychologists. I was accused of submitting a blog post […]
- Psychology
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Macho Man Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls
A man’s only as old as the woman he feels. – Groucho Marx I suppose that it’s the job of every psychologist to analyse the deep and hidden impulses that underscore the actions of men and women. Their job is to enlighten us, to differentiate between what is inherent to our genome, from what […]
- Culture
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One “D” Or Two? – Bilingualism And “Le Brain”
Bilingualism isn’t all fun, I’m afraid. There are certain words in English that I loathe, and there are certain words in French that I hate, when I’m forced to spell them. I still haven’t found a way of remembering that the French word “adresse” and English word “address” are spelt differently whilst, apparently, meaning the same thing. […]
- Science
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Artificial Intelligence And Human Stupidity
If you had to choose between being shot by a human or a robot, what would be your choice? By choosing the human, you are probably gambling on the odd chance that a human might show compassion, when looking into your eyes. Robots, if programmed to kill, would show no such compassion. Your only chance […]
- Science
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Pennies From Heaven – Trump Turns His Back On Humanity And Reason
In order to fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord… – Donald Trump, June 2017 And every time it rains, it rains, pennies from heaven Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven You’ll find your fortune fallin’ all over […]