Grains of Sand

Observations from a strange planet

Monday, December 31, 2018

The Unread

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There are lists. There are lists of lists. And, presumably, there are lists of lists of lists. If I were going to make a list of lists, w...
Friday, March 18, 2016

The worst bit of land in Sodom and Gomorrah

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Musah Muhammad lives between the dump and the stagnant lagoon. His is unequivocally the worst bit of land in Sodom and Gomorrah, a freshly ...
Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Books of 2015

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Much but not all of what I read this year was work -related.  My recommendations are: Owning the Earth by Andro Linklater Cosmigraphic...
Tuesday, December 01, 2015

'A democratic Anthropocene'

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...There’s an ethnography of Alaska’s Athabascan peoples, by Richard Nelson, called Make Prayers to the Raven. Its gist is that these “anim...
Saturday, July 25, 2015

Embryon philosophers

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I have review essay on Alberto Manguel's Curiosity in The Guardian today. Here are some further notes. as children...      Recalli...
Tuesday, April 21, 2015

"They want the forest to be happy"

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Q. What aspects of the music did not prompt a universal response?  A. We looked at whether the music evoked happy/joyful or sad/scary fee...
Saturday, February 07, 2015

Norm enforcement

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For rebellious behaviour, slaves are pinned to the ground, and burned by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the ...
Friday, February 06, 2015

The Singular Universe

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Here are a few additional notes and comments relating to a  review  of  The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time  published in The G...
Monday, January 12, 2015

On Blake

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I have contributed a comment to the blog for the Inspired by Blake* festival in Oxford, which begins on 18 January.   This follows a pos...
Monday, December 29, 2014

Best of the year

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My recommendations for this year include: Listen : an interview about Syria with the surgeon David Nott  and many episodes of Radiolab ...
Sunday, November 09, 2014

Protect the Hen Harrier

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I have a review of  Ten Million Aliens by Simon Barnes in the Telegraph.  The following passage was cut in the edit: ...The point is n...
Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Suburbs

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We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity. But we visit and remember lakes, for...
Friday, October 17, 2014

Alarms and surprises

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Paul Kingsnorth's LRB review  of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall is wor...
Friday, September 05, 2014

"Life is something that happens on the edge"

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This post contains some additional notes and comments to my review of The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf , which is published here ....
Thursday, July 17, 2014

Superintelligence

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I have a review in The Guardian of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and A Rough Ride to the Future by James Lovelock. I wasn't...
Tuesday, May 13, 2014

A distant roar

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...At first there weren't any rivers either, the waters ran deep under the ground. All you could hear of them was a distant roar, like ...
Tuesday, May 06, 2014

A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene

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On 4 May I presented a small Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene at the First Athens Science Festival . The event was filmed .  H...
Monday, March 31, 2014

"A sense of immanent meaning or significance"

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I spent a good part of a day in February with Richard Mabey, and wrote a piece for The Telegraph , which was just published (see note). ...
Tuesday, March 04, 2014

The unanswerable question

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The apparent confusion between the reality of dreams and the reality of waking life... allows writers to use dreams to question reality wi...
Monday, February 17, 2014

SF & AI

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At a talk at the Oxford Martin School titled Artificial intelligence: examining the interface between brain and machine , I asked Anders Sa...
Thursday, February 13, 2014

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

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  I have a review of The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert in The Guardian. Here are a few notes and comments on points which I did...
Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Dream flight

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Prompted by a recommendation here , I am reading The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky.   He relates that the Eveny of Siberian used to...
Friday, January 17, 2014

Sonic Wonders

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I have a review in The Guardian of Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox.  Here are some further notes. Several of the wonders mentioned ...
Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Dragon

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Nietzsche...warned that the emergence of something, whether an organ, legal institution or a religious ritual is never to be confused...
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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Five good books from 2013

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A cheerful report ( Nuclear war would 'end civilization' with famine, study says ) puts me in mind of the first book in a “top five”...
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