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The Basque Country
So had a Scottish/Basque family in clinic -cue ignorance! Area of northern Spain, main city is Bilbao. Autonomous region. Basque culture extends into Navarre (also Spain) plus over Pyrenees into France. Language is unrelated to any other! Ibendrola, the power company, is based in Bilbao. Ignatius of Loyola, Paco Rabanne, Cristobal Balenciaga are famous Basque…
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Mistaken Identity – Reith Lectures 2016 – Kwame Anthony Appiah
Genetically we seem predisposed to seek links with groups outside our immediate family, and seek differences that distinguish “us” and “them”. Important in the small groups that early man survived in. Colour – Western peoples assumed everyone came from Abraham, via Noah, and race/colour were considered mere geographical variations! Race ideas emerged at same time…
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Super moon
I missed the super moon the other night, which is to say I saw the full moon but didn’t know it was the closest the moon had been since 1948. SO in theory the moon would have been about 20% brighter than average. But the moon is actually brightest at the time of an opposition…
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Pluto's icy heart
This 1000 km wide heart-shaped patch is free of craters, so must be very young. It’s actually a depression, probably a massive impact crater 7km deep, now full of frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, with glacial flows. It’s also on the move – the ice is denser than surrounding water ice, and so it…
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Culture Wars
Josie Appleton (Institute of Ideas) When wars of religion ended, wars of culture took over. Islamism began with people leaving Europe to go to Afghanistan or Bosnia. Jihad was how Bedouin tribes came together to defend community or expand empire. Al Qaeeda then declared war on US colossus but chain of command, objective focussed cf ISIS – have…
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Right or happy?
Where man forces himself to agree with wife, QOL increases slightly for woman but falls significantly for man. Would same be true if other way round?! [Xmas BMJ 2013]
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Big Man Doctor
“This phrase (dai fu) has two meanings. When pronounced dai and fu with a neutral and soft tone, it means doctor. When pronounced da and fu, it means senior official. Both are rather archaic.”
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I have nothing to hide
“Because a right is not particularly valuable to you at a particular time because you are not threatening, you assume it’s not valuable to anyone. But you have not idea how laws or social norms are likely to change in the future. You could find yourself in trouble regardless of whether you’d done anything “wrong”…
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Jack and the Beanstalk – an economic analysis
“Jack was commissioned by his mother to sell the last of their worldly goods on the open market. This flies in the face of common sense, the last of their worldly goods was a source of constant food, and potentially a source of steady revenue. “The mother obviously did not know of one of the…
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Lister
In 1865, Joseph Lister (originally from Essex) applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the compound leg fracture of an eleven-year-old boy at Glasgow Infirmary – after six weeks, the boy’s bones had fused back together, without suppuration. He subsequently published his results in The Lancet. His inspiration had been Pasteur’s work on germs. …