Thinking can be dangerous. I have always been a lover of close thinking – though never very good at participating – it is instructive to listen to people who can divide up the meaning of sentences and slice away at them as you might a cake with smaller and smaller portions. We can see an analogous…
If Only . . .
I was fascinated about six years ago to see a black and white picture of a machine moving an atom from one place in a lattice (I think it was a metal) to another place. The possibility of creating materials one atom at a time suggests the making of perfect crystals (one person suggested a…
Family Ties
It is often the case that no matter who hurts us in our lives, it is our families that have the ability to hurt or give us happiness more readily than that which we can imbibe and feel from other people. It is our families after all that know all our ‘buttons’ and press them…
Regime Change
The word dance done by politicians around the world not to want to change the regime in Libya (or for that matter any Muslim country currently undergoing upheavals this spring) because they do not want to give fuel to to al-Qaeda but nonetheless do want to support the democracy movement has its detractors. Not the…
Copycats
Human beings are great copycats. As soon as we find a thing that works hundreds of us all bound to become experts or a part of it, suddenly placing it in any of a series of mythic feelings and suggestions which then become a part of the culture. We invent a car and before we…
Why And Again Why
I read an horrific story on the Internet yesterday about a Libyan woman from one of the rebel held towns bursting into an hotel where journalists were questioning the regime, and revealing she had been gang raped by fifteen men. As Libyan security officials shouted in her face and bustled her out, I as did much…
A Poem
A series of poems on the many loves of humanity is coming out later this year. This is love in old age: Your eyes speak of my youth and my hand holds Yours with that ease of emotion only Years can grow; suppleness has changed to folds, Wrinkles crease our nakedness, laughingly The young…
How To Write a Masterpiece
There seem to be two main ways to choose the subject matter to a work that will be considered a masterpiece. In the first you choose a huge subject filled with human suffering and triumph with a protagonist or main characters that many people may associate with even though they have no direct experience of…
Stress And The Single Mind
I was feeling in need of doing something different today from the editing and home bound lifestyle that seems to rule my days so I went into the garden on a warm sunny afternoon and weeded around the roses. I have always known that doing something ‘physical’ if you spend most of your life using…
Underlying Management
I have often wondered about how one kind of evolved brain could hold so many contrary options about the same things given the same senses and facts. Why is one person’s brain socially minded and another not so. I think the underlying ways in which assumptions are laid down in human thinking is one of the…