Grombles

There are around 1,500,000,000 muslims, 1,000,000,000 christians, just 14,000,000 jews (it surprises most people how few) plus assorted other faiths on our planet. What they all have in common is an allegiance to outdated thinking and a nervousness about waking up and moving on. A tiny few are so nervous, they believe they are sanctioned by a mystical deity to kill people who suggest their books are out of date and should be considered historical curios rather than offering some sort of enlightenment. All sentient species develop faith. They need constructs to explain the world they experience and to establish safe, reliable strategies to deal with them. A chicken knows not to go into water because it can't swim and will therefore drown. It doesn't know why it can't swim, nor what drowning is. It just has faith that water is bad news. Likewise humans who live in far more complex environments and social groups have developed a vast range of constructs to ensure that they s...

Matthew Syed wrote eloquently in the Times: "The problem in the Middle East is not with Sunnis, Shias or even Isis. It's with religion itself. The Bible like the Koran, has elements that can be interpreted as authorising violence; if Christianity in the West has caused less bloodshed in recent centuries, it's only because it has become less religious. The more "revealed truth" gives way to Enlightenment ideals of evidence and reason, the less followers of a given creed kill those who take a different view." Today we heard the disgusting and tragic news that yet another school has been bombed by Boko Haram. 47 children were killed and countless severely injured at a science and technology school in Nigeria. This is the most recent in a series of vile horrors committed by these madmen in the name of their deranged version of Islam. As Syed says, it's not the books they believe in that are the problem. It's the mad interpretation they put on their co...

After around four decades of trying to work out what does and doesn't contribute to business success, these days I spend much of my time mentoring others to help them discover the same thing (fortunately I can afford to do this because I did eventually manage to work out some of the answers). Over the years I have come to realise that successful business founders share a number of characteristics which seem to be lacking from those who try, but fail. Perhaps serially. So here are some observations: Who is the business being created for? I am often confronted by excited wide-eyed people clutching business plans that tell you about the fortunes they are going to make, but which lack the single most important factor any business requires, and which is answered by the question - Who wants it to succeed most - the founders or their customers? If it's the former, then the business is being created for the wrong reasons. Businesses that provide what customers need and really wan...

So my iPhone 4S fell on the floor. The screen crazed and my old faithful finally joined every other iPhone in the house. Tricky to read and not worth stealing. But it was only a couple of weeks away from the release of the much vaunted 6 and my network contract had expired long ago. These days I buy SIM only contracts with EE. Vastly better coverage than the loathsome Vodafone and O2, and cheaper to boot. So what I needed was an unlocked 6. No problem. Ordered it on Apple's website and within a few days it arrived. Hurrah. Although Apple did send me an SMS text to my old iPhone with a link to a website that an iPhone can't read! iTwats. Now the most important thing not to do to an iPhone, as I had already discovered, is drop it. The fancy box it arrives in has a tight fitting lid that you have to pull off as the increasing vacuum inside tries to stop you. Finally the lid popped off, releasing my precious and precariously balanced, as I now discovered, £700 iPhone. In slow ...

I've not gone barking mad or joined some weird religious cult (aren't they all?). But I do predict that we will make contact with intelligences from other planets soon. Here's my reasoning: There are approximately 100,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy (easy way to remember this order of magnitude is it's one hundred, thousand, million). Usefully there are also approximately the same number of galaxies in the universe. And assuming every star has about the same number of planets orbiting it as our Sun, and that the Milky Way is an average size of galaxy, that means there are around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe. A lot. Scientists have long debated the probability of life, as we would recognise it - reproducing, eating, etc - existing outside Earth. Most agree mathematically that it's a certainty. What they did was take all the components they believed were required for life to have evolved on Earth and then extrapolate what they know about...

I am a big fan of The Royal Institution  where I've been a member for about 30 years. Their most interesting activities are their Friday Evening Discourses which last exactly one hour and feature august speakers from somewhere in the wide world of science - usually academics. The audience comprises RI members and their guests who broadly enjoy learning about leading edge science presented in an entertaining and, usually, easy to understand way. The RI was in fact founded by Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davy to promote science to the glitterati of London society. Today it's a bit of an anachronism overtaken to some extent by TV documentaries, the internet and social goliaths like TED. But I personally get a great deal out of membership if for no other reason that it gives me a good excuse to start the weekend with a Friday night out in London preceded by a stimulating topic of conversation for the West End dinner which follows. Last Friday I went to a particularly interesting...

Is it just me, or does the West's indignance about Putin invading the Crimea reek of hypocrisy in the light of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and countless other invasions and regime changes we've tried to effect during recent decades? And the people we've 'rescued' don't even speak our language, share our cultures or have the faintest idea who we are. And none of them are thanking us now. The other side of the hypocrisy is exemplified by the Falkland Islands whose inhabitants voted to remain British - despite Argentina, not unreasonably from a purely geographic point of view, claiming territorial sovereignty. So it is OK for the UK to sail half way around the globe to maintain British dominion in far away places, but not OK for Russians to pop next door to protect Russians. It would seem that at least 96% of Crimeans welcome Putin's invasion if you can trust their referendum... which the West are trying to call illegal. I don't recall being asked if I wan...