It has been very frosty outside the past week, the ground is a solid, hard block that crunches when you walk over it. A friend of mine visited on Saturday to talk about a trip to India and in particular the Mumbai area and when she arrived she said she had heard a lot of…
Month: January 2011
The Castration of Knowledge
An admiral of the Ming Dynasty in China, Zheng he captained seven voyages to the Indian Ocean starting from 1405 at the request of Emperor Yongle. Zheng He’s expeditions also aimed to expand the Ming Empire’s influence overseas and establish an alternative trade route in place of the Silk road, which fell under the control…
Angels And Devils
We cannot go as far back as the first intellectual discussions human beings had about the world, but as far back as we are able to go we find reflected in our beliefs the dichotomy between good things happening and bad things happening. Born from the experience of everyday living and from the observation that…
High End Geophysics
Someone once told me that if you read anything or hear anything in the political sphere, before answering one should ask the question, ‘Who benefits?’ Who benefits from me knowing this, who benefits from this happening, who benefits if this becomes law etc. So when people criticize the Climate Change science I always ask this…
The Politics Of Nonsense
Even a cursory glance at the history of all countries shows us that there are links between the thinkers on all sides of the political spectrum, what we broadly term left, right and centre. It is interesting to note that despite the links shown by cross-country co-operation between political parties of similar persuasion, people do…
This Mobile Living
There is a scene in the book ‘How Green Was My Valley’ (I believe) in which the protagonist walks with a girl from another village and gets home late to find his male relatives sitting with their boots on waiting for trouble. The reason being that the girl comes from the next valley and they…
Wind In The Willows
My mother was asking for a copy of Wind in the Willows to read and of all the books written for children in the twentieth century (it was published around 1908) it is one of the few that speaks to adults as much if not more than young children. Not just because Kenneth Grahame used…
Achieving One’s Goals
I am sure from sometime during school onwards we have all set ourselves goals to achieve. I also recall from my years fund raising how the first thing we used to write was the ‘aims and objectives’ of the project, goals not there for the individual, but for the group. And in a way individual…
Chilled Spring
This past week Snowdrops (Galanthus) started to appear in the garden amidst the hard frosts and very cold days. They are the first flowers of spring and are often seen coming up through snow. The Dogwood (Cornus) and Honeysuckle (Lonicera) are giving the tiniest leaves. On my walks there is one long bank that every…
Cries In The Dark
Some days when my mother’s illness surprises even me and she screams and talks and calls out for twenty hours at a stretch I wonder about the fragility of the human mind, a collection of impulses and chemicals modern science is only just getting to grips with and about which it still lacks a good…