When there is so much suffering in this world, and our lives hang on so many fragile threads, it is one of the tragedies of human existence that we waste so much time puting ourselves and each other down – judging, blaming, hating. Energy that is wasted, in destruction of things, pasts, futures. Energy that…

A design was submitted for a Forth rail bridge by Thomas Bouch in 1879. Preliminary construction had already begun when the Tay bridge disaster occurred on 28th December 1879. Consequently all further work was suspended, and a new design was begun in 1883. The Bouch design looked more like the modern Forth road bridge, except…

Used to be thought that 150 times as big as our sun was the limit. But a star has been found in the Tarantula nebula, which is 265 times bigger, and must have been at least 300 times bigger to begin with. Not surprisingly, it is also the most luminous star ever found, close to…

“The great paradox in the struggle for modern manhood is that we simultaneously feel adrift because of anomie and cripplingly trapped because of consumerism. “The problem with consumerism is that it heavily emphasizes choice, to the complete exclusion of the idea of living with that choice. “That might work with your toothpaste, but the most…

That one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land. A metaphor for…

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. [Niels Bohr]

Voor het eerst in 160 jaar is dat Nederlanders niet meer groeien. Nederlanders zijn de langste mensen ter wereld. The Dutch are the tallest people in the world, but they appear to have stopped growing, finally. It remains to be seen whether any other races/peoples in the world eventually catch them up.. [elsevier.nl]

Our job as artists is to keep our eyes open while everyone else’s are shut. [Werner Herzog]

Bit late with my news, but stunned to hear that Switzerland has banned minarets in a referendum – European court of human rights will of course have to reject if someone actually followed through with a legal challenge. What this sadly reveals is that what people do in the privacy of the polling booth is…

80th anniversary this year of evacuation of St Kilda. 40 miles west of North Uist, the most isolated part of the United Kingdom. Has the highest sea cliffs in Britain, inhabited for thousands of years. The people here hunted seabirds eg gugha (young gannets). Donald S Murray in Sunday Herald points out how the story…