Tag: BBC news
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Hide and Seek
I guess the hunt is never over. Just when you think you’re winning, a sleeper cell surfaces, one you hadn’t even suspected, and closets itself somewhere you’d never think to look –an endless game of hide and seek. A Samsara of possibilities. An yet, what would be the thrill of exploration if you knew all…
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Statistics and Gender
Statistics, the collation, analysis and ultimately, the interpretation of data, have never been easy – at least for me. They have never reached the level of intuitive and, indeed, have barely climbed past manipulative in my head. And I readily admit to occasional cognitive dissonance even when they are used to support what I already…
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Probiosis
Bacteria, by and large, have received a bum rap (pardon the pun). Ever since they were discovered, there was a sense they were up to no good. Why were they always hanging around sick people, it was asked? And why did foul smelling things –the miasma (you gotta love these words)- always have bacteria skulking…
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Is there really Something in a Name?
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. So said Shakespeare’s Juliet. And yet even then –especially then- it mattered. Tribes have always mattered; we have always been known by our tribes: we are all either us or them aren’t we?” And little has changed…
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The itsy bitsy teenie weenie?
I am no longer simply bemused at the secular paranoia that seems to be growing like Topsy in the Western world; I am becoming irritated; I am becoming annoyed that it is now even conflating fashion with politics and spreading like blight in a deliberately monocultured crop. Pick your battles, folks –this is a demeaning…
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The Obstetrical Celibate
Celibacy seems so counterintuitive and aberrant to me that I’m constantly amazed how close to the surface it seems to float. Its etymology comes from a Latin word meaning ‘unmarried’ and that, in turn, is an amalgam of two proto-Indo-European words meaning ‘to live alone’, but its exact definition seems contextually influenced. For example, despite…
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Do We Really Understand?
Okay, call me a cynic, or maybe even a curmudgeon, but I sometimes wonder just how much we understand about Information –and by extension, it’s relationship to Knowledge. Information can be construed as the answer to a question or, seen from a different perspective, as that which has the potential to resolve uncertainty. Numbers, for…
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Leave Me Alone
I have lived in a hospital as an on-call obstetrician on more days –and nights- than I can count over the years; hospitals were the grudging homes for me ever since medical school and the subsequent ages of specialty training that fell upon me like unbidden hats. And despite the palimpsest of colours I was…