A change of pace!
George McConnell
Know Yourself …. Can You?
The wonders of the world wide web – not only have I made contact with lots of old friends, I have also made some very good new ones. I love the diversity of characters that you get to meet – and, in my experience, there are plenty of ‘good’ people – or – at least, people who give the impression of being ‘good’ because we all know how easy it is to create a persona that is false.
What Good Is That?
This is a ‘first’ in my blogs – I am starting to write this without knowing where it is going to end up! The trigger was the thought that I enjoy learning – I will ‘devour’ new information – I often follow trails through the world wide web and find myself at places that I didn’t envisage when I started on the journey.
The Science Delusion
Been trying to decide which Sheldrake book to read next – saw some good videos that led me to this one. Haven’t read much of it so far, but it seems to be more to my taste than the previous book of his that I read.
Having got to the end, this is a marvellous book – it will enter my own personal Hall of Fame – that is for sure. Do I believe everything he writes? I don’t know. Do I understand everything? Almost certainly not. However, the idea that Science should be treated as fallible in, in my view, perfectly reasonable. There is no good reason why there should be special rules to protect Science.
I will, once I have digested the book, post something in the main blog.
Predictably Irrational
A very interesting read – have particularly liked the comparison of behaviour when operating under the social domain as against the market norms. That is something that many employers need to understand. There were lots of useful anecdotes and reports on research that shows that we are all often irrational – and predictably so!
The Long Earth
Very interesting – one of the most fascinating things about the book is that it is difficult to know what it is about – yes, the subject matter is clear and can be read on the back cover, but asides from the fact that the “Long Earth” exists the story remains a mystery – not that any of it is difficult to read – simply even 90% of the way through the book I, for one, have no idea where it is going to end!
Jonah’s Journey
Given that Terence and I once started to write an opera together, the least I could do was read his book.
Musicophilia
My current reading. Well part of it at least. A fascinating set of case studies about how music is processed by the brain and the effect of various disorders on that processing. Not a book to read cover to cover though!
Exploring a Grey Area
The leap from doing good to doing evil is often no more than a tiny step. Those of us who try to be ‘good’ might want to think that we are almost immune from the ‘dark side’ unless we make a mistake – but the reality is that (at least in my eyes) in many aspects of our lives there is a continuum stretching from ‘perfectly good’ at one end to ‘perfectly evil’ at the other – and the nature of continuums is that somewhere along the line we step over from one side to the other!
The Other Side of “If Only”
When you start to think about it, it is sobering – no – downright scary just how many people and events may be affected in the future by the decisions we make, individually and collectively, today. I may believe that I have some idea of the immediate effects however, given the way that the world is now connected so much more than ever before, it is next to impossible to determine the totality of the effect of each and every decision we make.