Salons: where good ideas continue to come from…
EPIC Salons: Creating spaces for ideas to flourish What do San Francisco in the 1960’s, Vienna at the turn of last century, Calcutta during the 1800s and London in the […]
Design fictions
One of the sessions I’m looking forward to at EPIC is the Design fictions workshop with Nicloas Nova and Anab Jain. ‘Design fiction?’, you ask, ‘what is that?’. Science fiction […]
Orwell vs. Huxley
Since NSA surveillance became apparent with the leaks by Edward Snowden, sales of Orwell’s 1984 have leapt. Orwell’s view of the future was one in which power deprives us of […]
Facebook's vision and it privacy
From a nice essay by Paul Ford in MIT’s Technology Review on Facebook, Facebook Home and its moral ‘vision’ Facebook’s self-reflexive utility explains why the company finds privacy so tricky. […]
A personal reflection on Veer Badhra Mishra, Mahantji
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 […]
What are traditional societies for?
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 […]
Economics 101
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 […]
First simplify
“You can’t simplify reality without understanding it first.” Carl Theodor Dreyer, Danish filmmaker.
Peckham, Poundland, Post Its and the Peacewall
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 […]
Self portrait
Breathtaking picture by a Japanese astronaut on the ISS via. There’s another, much earlier one, here.
The riches of India and the poverty of some perspectives
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 […]
Madmen in authority
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 […]
EPIC – a few pictures
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 […]
Animated behaviour
Another in the RSA Animate series, this time by Dan Ariely, on human motivation and behaviour, specifically lying and dishonesty.