says Richard Holloway, in Sunday Herald article about Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.  It comes from a failure to imagine ourselves into lives and cultures foreign to our own experience.

According to Jay Zagorsky (Ohio State University), there is no link between IQ and wealth.  Intelligent people do tend to earn more – but there's lots of other factors that contribute to whether or not you can turn your income into material wealth.  I'm not sure what the important ones are; presumably spending on holidays,…

I'm a bit ignorant about this, but I think the butterfly effect is to do with how complex systems, that have positive as well as negative feedback mechanisms, can produce massive effects from minimal changes. A buddhist podcast suggested that this means small acts of kindness have the potential to produce enormous benefit.  Well, possibly… …

Fabulous long weekend in Ronda, Andalucia.  Flew direct to Malaga, not bad although bit of an early start.  Joined the queues at car rental (where are all these people going?) before heading out towards Marbella.  The coast road is relatively quiet (an expensive toll) but soul destroying; slabs of housing stuffed into dry valleys next…

1746, 14 000 men went to battle.  Not really Scottish vs English; at least half of the "English" army were Scots, and the Jacobites were reinforced with French, Irish and English volunteers or deserters.  The Jacobite army was always meant to be an international force, with the bulk being French but the army ships were…

Henry Stanley, who was sent by a New York newspaper to find David Livingstone, has had his reputation rescued by biographer Tim Jeal.  Stanley was born John Rowlands, an illegitimate Welsh workhouse boy who lied all his life about his origins – he took his name from a cotton magnate who was supposed to have…

Is the maternity unit I worked at, overlooking the Meadows.  James Simpson was young obstetrician who experimented with gases on himself, trying to find something effective in childbirth.  He was the first to try chloroform in childbirth (but had to retranslate Genesis first in order to convince the public that it was not blasphemous to…

Not a dust speck.What's hot? Cold?Alone on my blue mountainI want for nothing.

How good it would be to be lost againNight falling on the compass, and the mapTurning to improbable flamesBright ashes going out in the ponds. And how good it would beto stand bewildered in a strange woodWhere you are the loudest thingYour heart making a deafening noise. And how strange when your fear of being…

Ok, not a catchy title.  But basically, this is about a blast from the past. 250 million years ago, something happened that killed 96% of all living species on earth.  A world of great coral reefs, sabre toothed lizards, forests and trilobites disappeared, making room for the dinosaurs. And what happened is a lesson for…