Category: General

  • The thread that connects us to the divine

    For most people what they think of as their consciousness is really their ego. We are ruled by sensations and the reaction to these sensations: what we like or don’t like. In general, people seek out what they enjoy and run away from what they don’t enjoy. Of course there are exceptions. Parents make sacrifices…

  • Is time speeding up?

    There’s a perception that some people have that time is speeding up. That is, a minute now seems shorter than a minute, say, ten years ago. Sceptics of course debunk this claim as being ‘scientifically inaccurate’, but there is some evidence of this. In fact, what does the concept of speeding up time mean? We measure…

  • Micro-aggressions and gender neutral pronouns

    I was recently told by someone that had I looked at her profile I would have noticed her preferred pronouns that I should be using instead of using the words ‘she’ and ‘her’. What she didn’t realise was that it wasn’t that I didn’t know — it was that I didn’t care. Or to be more precise,…

  • So you want the vaccine to prevent Covid

    Leaving aside the conspiracy theorists, everyone knows that Covid is a killer that can threaten the existence of the human race. We are told that thousands of people are dying daily from Covid and unless we wear masks and take steps to avoid contact with other people the outcome will be overloaded health services and…

  • Binary thinking

    I’ve written before about left and right brained thinking. One of the characteristics of left-brained thinkers is that they think in binary. The left side of the brain deals in patterns so thoughts and concepts are put into boxes: an object is a table or a chair or it’s a wall or a door; an idea…

  • People don’t examine facts, they see things through an ideological lens

    Some time ago I wrote an article (The girl with the X ray eyes) on a documentary how CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) under the leadership of Prof. Richard Wiseman set out to discredit a Russian girl Natasha Demkina. The documentary was an attempt to debunk the claims but it was…

  • The enemy is not who you think it is

    There’s a movie from around 2010 called ‘V for Vendetta’. It depicts a UK where a right-wing authoritarian regime has come to power and a vigilante (V) takes on the ruling government. The characteristics of the ruling party are: right-wing, intolerant of minorities, pro religion, and resented by the mass of the population. In reality…

  • Your chances of dying from Covid are …?

    I saw a question on Reddit recently asking that if there had been no action taken on Covid, what would have happened? One of the answers said you would notice when your neighbours were dying and the coffins were stacked up in the streets. I hope that people who inhabit the Reddit world are not…

  • This is how it starts

    Many years ago IBM was the big force in computing. They had an advertising slogan ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’. In other words, if you need a computer project done and you choose a company other than IBM, and it goes pear shaped (as they often do), your boss is going to…

  • If you want to understand the present, study the past

    My mother was brought up in a very Jewish family in Poland. In the early 1930s her parents — my grandparents — took her and her brother out of Poland to Belgium and then to London. They knew that something dreadful was going to happen and they wanted to move to a safe place. Like many truely religious people…