Random Thoughts

There is a culture where 98 percent of the people eat red meat, 50 percent of the people are obese and 45 percent of people smoke cigarettes. Yet they have incredible longevity. All of those lifestyles are against modern clinical guidelines but an alarming number of these people are centenarians - they lived to be over 100 years old, even living the bulk of their lives before the advent of modern cancer diagnosis and medicine. In the 21st century, almost all of us know centenarians, but when the topic of lifestyle comes up, as it frequently does, the answers are confounding. Though we…

Ready, set, type! Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock By Sally O'Reilly, The Open University We live in a culture obsessed with speed: fast-food, Twitter, overnight celebrity, instant make-overs and cutting edge techno-gadgets. We drive too fast, desperate to get ahead literally as well as metaphorically. And when we get home we surf TV, scroll through Facebook, eat, drink and talk on the phone. Apparently, the only thing we want to slow down in the modern world is the ageing process – and it’s no surprise that our solution to that problem is a quick injection of Botox or a lunch-time face-lift. Far…

A surgeon performing a lithotomy on a patient, c. 1747. Wellcome Library, CC BY-SA By Pam Myers, University of West London You don’t have to be a horror fan to be well acquainted with some of the 20th century’s classic slasher movie music. Even if you’ve never sat through Psycho, you could probably immediately recognise the screeching murder scene motif, with its plunging, stabbing, atonal chord clusters. Or how about John Carpenter’s theme for Halloween, which takes a relentless, synth-based tempo, adding subtle drone textures and haunted effects to create an unsettling sonic landscape of…

Shia LaBeouf, Brad Pitt and more less cramped outside their tank in Fury. image by Sony Pictures By Clifford Williamson, Bath Spa University The latest corner of World War II to be dramatized for the big screen is small. Cramped, even. In Fury, starring Brad Pitt and Shia leBeouf, we follow the story of five American soldiers, a crew serving in one tank in Germany, 1945. Such an experience of the war was certainly unique. I was once told a story by a World War II veteran who served as a radio operator in one of the British Army tank regiments. As a treat, his son planned to drive him around…

Credit: mikecogh, CC BY-SA By Suzie Thomas, University of Helsinki Metal detecting enthusiast Derek McLennan’s recent discovery of Viking-age artefacts at a site in Dumfries and Galloway is both spectacular and impressive. Not only did he uncover a hoard of Viking-age artifacts, but this is his third major discovery in less than a year. Treasure hunting is a hobby that, to some, is the stuff of fairytale and yet it is also characterized by a very particular (and un-fairytale-like) stereotype. You only need look at the BBC’s current comedy Detectorists to get a sense of this. It also attracts…

In my latest attempt to debunk some of the nonsense that passes for analysis among Internet marketers I decided it might be worthwhile to talk about large systems theory.  The problem, of course, is that there really is no "large systems theory" (or a universal theory of large systems).  At least, we are still searching for the theory that will universally explain all large systems regardless of what field of thought in which we are discussing them.  We know that large systems exist and we intuitively feel that there is something characteristic about large systems which makes…

Credit: Millionaire Chess tournament When I was a kid, no one outside Texas played Texas Hold 'Em. We played Stud, we played Draw, we played Liar's, but not Hold 'Em. Like Esther Williams movies and organic food, some things just make their way into pop culture and there is no rational reason why. Texas Hold 'Em is now the most popular card game in the country, every month or so our neighborhood gets together at one of our homes and puts in 20 bucks each and we go at it. What I did play as a kid was chess. And a lot of Science 2.0 members did the same thing. Science 2.0 is the only science…

This may surprise, but Ludwig Wittgenstein, for many the greatest philosopher, or anyway the most eminent exponent of analytic philosophy according to Roger Scruton, maintained that music (!) was the most important to him, not formal logic or philosophy. On the other hand, it is known for at least a century, this I take from a mentioning in Bertrand Russell’s “The Analysis of Mind”, that artistic skills, apparently especially that of drawing pictures, suffer when the brain starts using more resources for rational tasks. Similarly, some who lose logic functionality due to stroke start drawing…

Mackie's at Taypack Ltd. has been around since 2009 but the joint venture between the Taylors, Perthshire potato farmers, and Mackie's of Scotland,  has finally figured out a way to differentiate themselves from Frito-Lay: they are making potato chips flavored like whisky and haggis. Everyone knows what Scotch is. Haggis is sheep stomach stuffed with meat and barley. Scotland's National Poet, Robert Burns, sang its praises in his works. Credit: tjmwatson, Flickr If you are a flatlander and can't stomach the idea of sheep intestines, you can opt for venison and cranberry…

Given its rampant crime, corruption and money issues, a lot of residents of Illinois publicly wish they could give Chicago away. They almost never had it at all. The original proposed northern boundary of Illinois was a straight line from the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan to just south of the Rock and Mississippi River confluence - had it been approved,  the northern 51 miles of the Illinois Territory would have become Wisconsin when it became a state in 1848. University of Illinois soil scientist Ken Olson says Illinois can thank Nathaniel Pope,  the Illinois Territory's…