The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is not a self-help book, nor is it one of those books of cod-philosophy that promise amazing (though ultimately ill-founded) insights into the modern condition. It is instead a carefully argued thesis meticulously supported by references to research, as well as by appeals to personal experience. Its core premise is that we possess a single consciousness, but two wills: one …
I was drawn to this piece by the welcome news that the terrible disease rinderpest has been eradicated. However, as I read it I became irritated when I came to this innocuous enough paragraph: As the virus spread, it left vast numbers of dead livestock in its wake, and communities without meat and milk. The loss of the animals, which were used to plough the land, crippled farming and led to widepsread starvation. My irritation …
I have been watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand with much enjoyment and would like to counter various sneering reviews such as this (it was another review I can no longer find that provoked me to write here)… The general drift seems to be to point out the banally obvious, that the show contains a constant diet of sex and violence, and to state that there is no plot. It seems to me that this entirely …
I had a revelation some years ago while camping with some friends near Cape Wrath when, over three days, I went barefoot. Not only did I discover that my feet could cope with any kind of terrain (by changing shape, they proved to be the best all terrain ‘shoe’ *grin*) but, more importantly, I realized in what a profound way feet ‘feel’ the earth. We clump around our world with ‘space suits’ on our feet …
Now here is something that blew my mind… First take a look at this then have a play with this. I have never come across a better justification for the Web (for computers, even) than this… Gapminder is a revelatory instrument (like a telescope, a microscope): it not only presents statistics in a way that anyone can absorb – but puts it somewhere where anyone with access to the Net can use it… I cannot …
