Handling Doubt And Uncertainty

Interesting graphic from psychologist and author Adam Grant on common thinking styles. COVID-19 has certainly highlighted the differences. In particular, slowly the approaches that directly encompass uncertainty seem to be accepted and hopefully this might become more common in other areas too. “The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty,

A Question of Scales

Interesting insight from the mathematician and theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson: “The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time

The Perfect Plastic Bag

From the BBC (Business) News: The number of plastic bags given out by major supermarkets in England has risen by 200 million in the past two years to exceed 7.6 billion last year – the equivalent of 140 per person and amounting to 61,000 tonnes in total… Many shoppers in England will have to pay

Coursera Courses

I noticed that there are some very interesting (free) courses provided by (US-based online university) Coursera: We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students,

Complexity Simplified

Last December I saw Manuel Lima‘s excellent talk on The Power Of Networks at the RSA, emphasising visualisation aspects and opportunities. The video above is a very interesting summary animation based on it. There’s alot of ideas crammed into the fast-moving 10 minutes! A very nice approach though. Part way through the video he mentions

How To Gag Innovation

Never Seconds’ first school-lunch photo, May 8, 2012. The tubular thing is mashed potatoes in a crust. Demoralising story in Wired yesterday relevant to the UK school food saga: For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the

It’s Not The Economy, Stupid!

“Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the very center of the universe, forgetting that the biosphere is what ultimately sustains all systems, both man-made and natural. In this sense, ‘environmental issues’ are not about saving the planet — it will always survive and evolve with new

A Demo Of Wireless Electricity

I’ve just come across this engaging talk by Eric Giler (CEO of MIT-inspired WiTricity ) at TED Global in 2009 where he demonstrates using wireless electricity to power up a TV and Google, Apple and Nokia mobile phones. The idea is so appealing! There’s a basic overview of their approach here and also see the image

The Aurora Borealis

From Der Spiegel: The aurora borealis, or the northern lights, are seen in the sky above the village of Ersfjordbotn near Tromsø in northern Norway, early in the morning on Monday. Aurorae are caused by the interaction between energetic charged particles from the Sun and gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, about

The Ant Farm Story

Whilst making coffee this morning, I idly browsed a newspaper that was lying around. It happened to be open on the Obituary page and I started randomly reading about a certain Milton Levine who I had never heard of before, and quickly became fascinated. There are many stories of unconventional ideas for successful large scale