Living life on the knife edge

Tonight was like any other Tuesday evening of my life, until that moment a stranger pulled a knife on me as I walked home. I don’t recount this story as a victim statement of any kind as the ironic thing about the situation is, although I was the one at the pointy-end of the knife, …

Research on hallucinogens

Altered states of consciousness and the hallucinogenic molecules which facilitate them, have been part of the human story since time immemorial. In more recent times, the “War on Drugs” stigmatised the personal use of conscious altering substances by making them highly illegal to possess. This in turn derailed legitimate scientific research on hallucinogens which was …

Proportional Misrepresentation

There are three kinds of lies; white lies, damned lies and statistics. - Mark Twain A recent Guardian article, deriving from an Essential Media poll around Australian's feelings towards Christmas, is an example of how statistics can be twisted or misrepresented to prove any point one cares to prove. In this case, it's a phenomenon we can …

Compress to impress

Increasingly on social media, we compress our message into the most condensed format possible. Maximising the limited resource of our reader’s attention, we try to get the maximum impact for minimum investment of their attention. But what consequences come of compressed information? Ths sntnc hs bn cmprssd by rmvng th vwls - This sentence has …

Answers and questions

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire Politics, or the game of getting re-elected, is one area where the art of dodging pointed questions is considered a required black art, which is either naturally occurring in an individual or acquired via coaching and specialised training. Politicians of the modern …

Do we learn from our past?

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana Since the beginning of recorded civilisation, we have documented the key moments from our collective existence and defined it as "our history".  This history has shown us where we came from, and with some analysis and understanding, serves to provide insight …