Many of you have asked me how it is that I can write a blog essay every week. My normal response is to say it is not as hard as you think. There are many likely sources for my weekly dabblings. I have normally been reading a book about something stimulating. I read the newspapers […]

Most of you don’t realise this and to the amazement of the more practical and pragmatic of you, you are all visionaries and mystics! Let me state a fact that might surprise you. No human being has ever experienced an objective world! Whatever you are experiencing right now is in fact a visionary experience. It […]

We have heard a lot in the news in recent times of loss or potential loss of jobs at Qantas, Holden, Ford, SPC Ardmona, Gove Alumina Refinery, Port Henry Aluminium Smelter and so on. There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth because the Government wouldn’t step in and have the Australian taxpayer prop […]

It was the good Dr Phil who introduced me to that wonderfully insightful book by Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn showed that the progress of science has been largely discontinuous. Most scientists work within a generally accepted set of theories (which Kuhn termed a paradigm) and are largely content to make […]

In psychology to “confabulate” means to fabricate a reason for something in order to rationalise our behaviour when in fact the behaviour has an unconscious cause. Most of you will think this is an academic concept that has little application to normal human behaviour. Surprisingly it is a very common human phenomenon. As the good […]

Despite his prolonged protestations of innocence, Craig Thomson has been finally found guilty of fraudulent use of his credit card whilst an official of the Health Services Union. In the face of a number of other complaints regarding alleged criminal conduct of unions (not the least of which included one involving the former Prime Minister, […]

In the Western world it was probably the increasing influence of science that caused the rise in atheism. Atheists tend to be philosophical naturalists – people who attempt to understand the world without invoking anything supernatural. As the ability of science to explain the physical world increased, the need for the supernatural decreased commensurately. Indeed […]

My wife would certainly attest to the fact that I have a particular abhorrence of spiders. It is hard to know how it originated. Our progenitors no doubt had some fear of spiders and even more so of snakes. They, as hunter gatherers would routinely have encountered these potential threats. As a result over the […]

I once had a strange discussion with the author of a so-called “New Age” book. He had some disparaging things to say about science and mathematics. To illustrate a point he maintained that even the universal constant pi could not be accurately determined. He, of course was misled. Because pi was unable to be defined as a proper […]

The world is endlessly complex, intricate and surprising. Conceptually we find that hard to cope with and consequently we spend a lot of effort in trying to simplify it. Some of our models of the world and its component parts have proved very useful first approximations and have aided our general understanding. However sometimes our […]