How trustworthy are scientific researchers?

Can we have confidence in bankers? Can we have confidence in politicians? We have a wee phrase in Scots “A hae ma doots” (“I have my doubts”). Well in the middle of this breakdown of trust and confidence in our economic and political institutions, along comes a piece of research from Edinburgh University which has [...]

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“Hidden illness” – MS as an example

Yesterday the BBC site posted an item about a patient’s experience of having MS. It was entitled “Living with a hidden illness”
This patient, Alison Potts, says this -
The boldest outward evidence of the disease appears in my MRI scans, but no one sees those. Together they tell the story of the last 15 years, each [...]

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The importance of imagination – Brian Eno

I caught this tiny snippet of an interview with Brian Eno on BBC Radio 4 this morning.
eno (click his name!)
The subject of the piece was his curating of the Luminous festival at Sydney Opera House.
Here is Eno arguing that not only do we need imagination more than ever now that we have hit these crises [...]

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Bridges, paths, connections….

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how everything is connected. Amy wrote a post about the relationship between Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizomatics and social networking today (we’re often in tune that way!) I’m also reading Michael Frayn’s “The Human Touch” which wonderfully explores our embedded, connected existence, the centrality of our subjective perspective, and [...]

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Living stone

It strikes me that in Japanese culture there is a great and sensitive understanding of the life, or the spirit, of stone. I was struck by that as I wandered through a couple of Japanese gardens recently. You just don’t see rocks like these in UK gardens, and there’s something about them which makes you [...]

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Time to reflect

I am a great fan of Japanese gardens. They have a design aesthetic which is quite different from the one which is the basis of most UK gardens. One of the elements I especially enjoy is their use of water. There is something amazingly calming about reflecting on the reflections……

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Putting people first….what should we measure?

While away on a trip to Japan recently I came across a news item about Bhutan’s development of a national happiness index. I’d read about this a few years ago and thought it was interesting but maybe just a gimmick or a passing fancy. I think it was the King of Bhutan who decided that [...]

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Resilience

If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong.
However, at a personal level, we need some [...]

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The End of Control

One of the most amazing capabilities of the human mind is the imagination. However, this great ability brings certain difficulties, not least of which is being able to imagine our own mortality. It’s this existential fear which underlies most, if not all, other specific fears. Whilst very few people actually believe it’s possible to escape [...]

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Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine

Today I took a short trip on the train from Kyoto to Inari.
When you get off the train in Inari Station, turn left, then immediately up the first road on your right you’ll see the first two of 10,000 Torii gates winding up the hillside on which the shrine is built.

Once you’ve climbed to the [...]

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