Not looked at my website (Paeds.org) stats for a long time. I had 1781 visits in the last month. Most were from the US, else from UK and then Malaysia (!) and Canada. Sadly, the average time spent looking at the site was just 25 seconds!!! The vast majority of visitors, bizarrely, went from Google…

Trust a well paid professional to make a banal perjorative comment (in the Observer) that completely fails to recognize reality, let alone make any constructive contribution to public health. Shame that professional is a GP, who should know better. Feel free to believe that a "healthy lifestyle" is the be all and end all of…

Cartier-Bresson: "Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things." "Photography is nothing – it's life that interests me", Cartier Bresson once said.  Dorothea Lange: "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera".

Is the 6th great extinction already upon us? The rate of species extinction is quicker now than at any point in the last 65 million years, when the cretaceous-tertiary (KT) extinction due to a meteor in Yucatan did for the dinosaurs. 75% of species disappeared. Prev extinctions cleared the way for the dinosaurs (Triassic-Jurassic, 205mya). …

Shape an Optimistic Explanatory Style – model a positive style yourself. Criticize behavior, not character Teach your children their ABCs – adversity, belief, consequence (as in I'm OK, you're OK; transactional analysis) Teach your children how to dispute their negative thoughts. Let Them Fail -They need to learn to persist in the face of failure.…

Appeared 400 000 years ago, spread throughout Europe and Near East when climate was still virtually tropical. Lived in caves, hunted in groups. Could make tools eg scrapers, axes and would cook (some) food. Big noses, extremely muscular. Named after the Neander valley in Germany where bones first recognized as being distinct from Homo sapiens.…

Watched Richard Jobson's film, 16 Years of Alcohol. Very poetic, between the episodes of violence. Finishes with these lines from "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by American poet Robert Frost: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to…

A star comes to the end of its life. It explodes as a supernova, showering particles out into the space – some light, gaseous, others heavier, such as soot (carbon) and sand (silica). Where these particles are swept together at sufficient density, perhaps around a young star, itself formed from collapsing clouds of hydrogen and…

So I turned 40 yesterday, and Pauline and I went to Argyll Arcade to spend my birthday money on a new watch. Was quite stressful, given that you can move a couple of feet along and be looking at prices with a couple of extra zeroes on the end, plus the variety is extraordinary. But…

Actually a series of paintings and prints (Munch clearly tried to monopolize on his success). Munch's mother died of TB when he was 7, his sister died of the same when he was 16. One of his younger sisters was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. He himself wrote that he inherited 2 of…