Month: July 2015
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Forget it?
Memories are tricky things. Sometimes they’re not around when you want them, only to arrive later, when you don’t; sometimes they surround you, pester you, like wasps at a picnic. And other times you can’t find them at all no matter where you look. But the really tricky ones are those that never happened and […]
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The Body’s Clock
Scientists –well, all of us- have been suspicious about the health risks of shift work for a long time now. Perhaps there is a reason buried somewhere in our genes that suggests night is for sleeping and daytime for working. Originally, no doubt, it was because it was difficult to see things in the dark […]
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Time Enough
Time, the faceless tyrant that rules our lives like an absentee landlord, is so abstract, so opaque, it is difficult to grasp. It is seeing through a glass, darkly if at all. Enslaving everything within its reach it is an impartial despot. Dispassionate in its all-embracing realm, we are each of us imprisoned and there is […]
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Age Prejudice
I suppose I should have seen it coming. I suppose I should have laid down firmer tracks, taken a more trodden path. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so influenced by Robert Frost’s poem, the Road Not Taken. But I was… ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled […]
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Why do we Know something?
Knowledge is interesting. But what is it, exactly? What does it mean to say you know something? Plato defined it as being justified true belief, but is it? Take Bertrand Russel’s famous thought experiment: the ‘stopped clock case’, for example. Alice looks at a clock and says it is two o’clock. Well, because the clock […]
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Risk Perception
Risk is something we all need to assess from time to time. The problem lies in how we do it. If there are factors we fail to take into account that affect our risk perception then our evaluation may as likely be wildly unrealistic, as appropriate. Emotion tends to skew things in one direction or […]
musings on women's health 