Too much optimism is bad for you

There’s an enormous literature these days on happiness, and pretty much all of it pushes some variety of positive thinking. The Happiness Hypothesis is one of the most thoughtful of these books, and Stumbling on Happiness is a fairly good read too, and Professor Layard’s Happiness is worth reading if you want to understand why [...]

Read Full Post »

the colour of light

the colour of light, originally uploaded by bobsee.
What colour is light?

Read Full Post »

Squeezing the world into pigeon-holes

Don’t you hate it when people judge you? And don’t you hate it when people assume they know all about you because they’ve stuck you in some pigeon hole? You know the kind of thing. I mentioned in another post sitting on the train recently next to two men who spent the whole journey dismissing [...]

Read Full Post »

the colour of the sky

the colour of the sky, originally uploaded by bobsee.
I swear the colours we see in the sky constantly change and even after days, and weeks, and months and years of skies, we still look up sometimes, and think, WOW, that’s BEAUTIFUL

Read Full Post »

the colour of the forest

the colour of the forest, originally uploaded by bobsee.
I love this kind of forest. It’s a very typical, not man-made, Scottish forest. I love it when the forest floor of ferns turns this amazing coppery brown colour

Read Full Post »

the colour of stone

the colour of stone, originally uploaded by bobsee.
These stones are only visible when the water level in the stream is low.
I love the greenish blues of some of them in amongst the grey ones

Read Full Post »

Conversations with sugarmouse

One of the great and surprising joys of blogging is the making of connections with people who you’d probably never ever have met in any other way. It’s one of the best reasons to blog in my opinion. I’ve made a good new friend with a fellow blogger who goes by the name of sugarmouseintherain. [...]

Read Full Post »

Inspiring fictional doctors

Did you know that Mills and Boon, the publishers of romantic novels, have a whole section dedicated to medical romance stories? Well, an Irish psychiatrist, Dr Kelly, has analysed about twenty of them and come up with some interesting findings. He found
marked preponderance of brilliant, tall, muscular, male doctors with chiselled features, working in emergency [...]

Read Full Post »

Outsourcing your mind

I wrote recently about how paper extends our minds, and how that related to a book I was reading just now, Being There, by Andy Clark (review coming soon), and then along comes this article in the NY Times. OK, it’s pretty tongue-in-cheek, but funny how I should happen across it when I’m just reading [...]

Read Full Post »

the colour of water

the colour of water, originally uploaded by bobsee.
This is a waterfall and stream (we call a small stream a “burn” in Scotland) on Skye.
Look at the colours in the water.
Aren’t they lovely?
This photo set me off checking out the colours of different natural phenomena. You’ll find the others in the coming days here [...]

Read Full Post »