I’ve been back for a week, now, from TEDGlobal: an ideas conference that is fast becoming my annual clarity retreat. Moved from its original host city of Oxford, the event was held in Edinburgh, Scotland and my arrival – to paraphrase John Denver – felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before. […]
A lovely young English couple are planning to visit my town in a fortnight, along with 70-odd out-of-town police officers, trucks-full of barricades and a personal hair stylist. As William and Kate’s arrival approaches, I find myself situated as a public servant, so I shan’t venture any opinion at all on Canada’s future with the […]
Whenever one paradigm gives way to another in science, the transition is traumatic. Hard-earned knowledge from the earlier perspective cannot be meaningfully compared with new research in the next paradigm, because even the language of the new scientific generation is slightly different. Information is lost or devalued. Such is the price of progress. The coming […]
As part of LWON’s first birthday celebrations, Ginny set a question for me: Your upcoming book is about experiencing time in different cultures. I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, could you tell us which country/city/village, in your opinion, has the best conception of time? (However you’d like to define best.) In other […]
Can you match up two differently-sized people by adding more person to the smaller man? If he acquires it the wrong way, he’s creating a liability – it will be less of a gain in strength than it is a blood-sucking cardio drain.
Little fingers swipe and stab at the iPad screen. An arrow traverses the “slide to unlock” bar and the monitor scrolls to the third page of apps, where YouTube’s icon zooms into yesterday’s search results. My one-year-old son chooses his favourite episode of Pocoyo – an animated, Spanish children’s show that’s been translated into English […]
Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens. With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal […]