The term ‘development’ implies betterment through change. Some aspects of development – like clean drinking water and reduced child mortality – are inarguable. The tasks of mitigating poverty and reducing violent corruption in developing countries are also admirable. The implication of betterment, however, becomes problematic when basic necessitates are met and pains relieved. When the… [Read more]
Oscar Wilde said a banal tragedy of life is how much is spent in friction. People like Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf who never had to work in retail for a living, had the time to become great writers. Instead of managing writing between night-shifts and scuppering together dinner Wilde read Robert Browning and Ovid… [Read more]
Star Trek fans have higher IQs than most. This false fact seemed believable to my younger and stupider teenage self, because the show boasts fascinating discussions and thought experiments. I am a fan, too, which gives me embarrassing bias. Yet if you asked me to name which series episode X is in, or how I… [Read more]
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that… [Read more]
Breaking down the process of writing an essay can streamline the process. Here I write out my own algorithm for writing a humanities essay, including my editing list of what-to-correct. This may be facile to you, but everything at one time has to be learned. Pointing out the obvious can make it obvious again, and… [Read more]
The longest-lived healthful people neither diet or workout. Those who live in Nicoya Costa Rica, or Okinawa, or Loma Linda California, for example. Instead of excluding a tableau of food, they eat what their (lucky) environment affords; vegetables and beans and wholegrains are common denominators. Instead of attending gyms, Nicoyans, Okinawans and Seventh Day Adventists… [Read more]
The most efficient way to learn a language is already known; I systematised it here, a post about a multilingual who learned to speak multiple languages as an adult for his opera career. (Also backed by computational linguistics.) Learning languages when an adult is arduous, and it’s that which makes him impressive. Children, on the… [Read more]
The best show on British television – Inside No 9. Each time I watch an episode I am reminded of Henri Bergson. Bergson debated with Albert Einstein in the 1920s on the nature of time. Einstein was adamant that though space-time dilates, it is nonetheless objective. Bergson was adamant that time is what one thinks… [Read more]
SASSY SOCIALIST MEMES is a Facebook page dedicated to socialist-themed memes. The page boasts a million and fifty thousand likes, which may at first suggest an appetite among young Facebook users for far-left politics. The so-called fathers of communism, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro populate the page; they feature, often, to satirise contemporary… [Read more]
The type of rationality assumed in economics is limited. One can generate solutions to theoretical problems, but the actual human behaviour is far messier. Each human has limits. Limits around what information is available, their own mind in processing that information, and the amount of time they have to think it through. Herbert Simon coined… [Read more]
