Veer Badhra Mishra, at the Krishna Lila, Tulsi ghat, Varanasi, 1997. I was saddened to hear the news this week of the death of Mahantji’s, and it led me to dig out the picture of him at his beloved … Continue reading
EPIC 2013 is coming. The Call is out and can be found here. Tickets will be going on sale in March.
From a great review of Jared Diamond’s book The World until Yesterday, by Wade Davis in The Guardian “Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind … Continue reading
From a lovely piece about the state of the British economy by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: “About thirty years ago, when Keynes was in the depths of economic unfashionability, going up to a group of macroeconomists … Continue reading
“You can’t simplify reality without understanding it first.” Carl Theodor Dreyer, Danish filmmaker.
This is a talk – a Pecha Kucha style one – that I gave at EPIC 2013 in October. I gave it in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I suspect having a little more time would have helped, but that’s … Continue reading
Breathtaking picture by a Japanese astronaut on the ISS via. There’s another, much earlier one, here.
Source unknown
Poverty is both absolute and relative, and also worth viewing through the lens of history too. This wonderful essay on the current state of India by William Dalrymple in The New Statesman points out the historical nature of poverty: In the … Continue reading
George Maynard Keynes quoted in a nice book review entitled Talking Short of 3 volumes on the economic crisis in the Dublin Review of Books The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they … Continue reading
Some pictures of EPIC 2012 which was held in Savannah and which, as co-chair, I am too fatigued to write about but here are just a few of the pictures I took.
Another in the RSA Animate series, this time by Dan Ariely, on human motivation and behaviour, specifically lying and dishonesty.
“Fiction is the study of the human condition through the medium of interesting lies—scenarios that explore some aspect of what it means to be a person” Charlie Stross
Wonderful image of these engines of world trade
And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears … Continue reading
Thanks to the Wayback machine I found an old post I wrote on kinship and social networks from Ideas Bazaar (2004 vintage). I’m in the midst of writing something about big data, and I’m struck by what, at the time of … Continue reading
In the time before a well developed market research industry, neuroscience, Big Data etc there were, perhaps, unknown and unknowable citizens: He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And … Continue reading
Provocative piece from the The New Enquiry, arguing against the idea that a ‘logged on life’ is a distracted one that detracts from the quality of our relationships in ‘real life’: “…we are far from forgetting about the offline; rather … Continue reading
“Increasingly, society operates pre-factually. In such cases, analyzing existing options may not provide the necessary insights needed to respond successfully because the challenge is one that has not been dealt with before and the facts do not exist yet.” Horst … Continue reading