I was much saddened today to read a report in Spiegel about massive traumatization among TEPCO workers dealing with the Fukushima disaster - and social prejudice against them. The original catastrophe of three nuclear-reactor meltdowns plus other mishaps followed the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The resultant catastrophes were not down with six months afterwards, and now it's one year after the Fukushima meltdowns, and it's still nowhere near over yet.

A Spiegel report (in...

So in the end the #Occupy London Stock Exchange camp by the steps of St.Paul's got forcibly cleared away in the very early hours of Tuesday. It all happened relatively peacefully. You can find a description of the clearing away here, you can find various photographs here, you can find here a Storify done by @OccupyLSX, you can find an editorial here, an opinon piece by John Harris here, an opinion piece by Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) here. There's a little bit of controversy about some of the legalites,...

There's a debate going on at the moment among Church of England (CofE) members regarding a column that the Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, wrote for the Sun on Sunday, the Murdoch successor newspaper to the dead News Of The World. The column by Sentamu (JohnSentamu) was panned by several in the media, amidst a general reaction about the mediocrity of the new Sun on Sunday. A Daily Telegraph writer noted Sentamu's stint on the Sun may well be a short one, despite much ballyhoo from News International...

So there's a bit of news that the Church of England (CofE) could lose the directing position in the prison chaplaincies service in England and Wales. That bit of news is not altogether surprising; there's a fair amount of chaotic social upheaval going on in Britain, with all sorts of peculiar, ill-aimed gambits going on (more on this below). The present UK government may give the job of Chaplain-General for the Prison Service to someone else other than an Anglican. Just why seems to be a matter...

So, yeah, they all managed to agree to a new bail-out plan yesterday. It wasn't quite credible to many, including the Fitch ratings-agency. At the same time, the Greek government apparently also let it be known they had gotten their previous sums wrong, and that things were worse than thought. Nobody seemed to find this surprising or to be news. The whole bail-out thing looks ever more like a controlled default and slide into a Great Depression for Greece.

What are the practical alternatives?...

It often costs to get the truth out to you, and that cost is often a reporter's life. Today it's reported that Marie Colvin, an American who was currently working as a reporter for the British Sunday Times, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed in Syria. They appear to have been directly targeted and there are fears for other journalists in the area. This is only a week after Anthony Shadid, working for the New York Times, died in Turkey of an asthma attack brought on by stress and...

It's Ash Wednesday, and Katla is making itself vocal again. Remember that volcano with the unpronouncable name in Iceland (Eyjafjallajökull) that managed to lay British and north European airline traffic low for a while? It was pretty devastating for travellers to and from the UK - and it was only a small eruption with a small volcanic ash-cloud plume.

Well now, Katla is stirring yet again. Katla is the big sister to Eyjafjallajökull, with maybe 10x the magma capacity, and it gave...

Some photos I made of a couple of different Glasswing(ed) Butterflies (Greta oto), which normally lives in Central America, taken at the Butterfly House in Hamm, Germany, late last year. The Glasswing Butterfly is a species which goes in for lek behaviour, that is, the males will gather together and do the same visual displays as each other, but competitively, while the females watch and choose. I.e., like a football match. The Glasswing also as an adult feeds on flowers like those from the aster/daisy/sunflower...

You could be forgiven for thinking Richard Dawkins is the AntiChrist, or worse the British Prime Minister, judging by the current fever in some parts of the British press to try damning Dawkins by any means possible, and by extension atheists and secularists too. The fever creates its own momentum, and converts it into a fashion. But what is the original fever all about? The fevermongers claim it's a reaction to Dawkins' outspoken campaign for secularism, but digging below the surface reveals something...

Yesterday an op-ed article by Saba Khalid appeared in Pakistan's Express Tribune newspaper, which is published in partnership with the famous International Herald Tribune, and is owned by the Lakson Group of companies. The article by Saba Khalid was titled "Celebs with mental disorders: Lock up the crazy"; while the online version has now been taken down, you can still for a short while find the Google Cache copy of the original page here. I also include a screen-capture pic of part of the article...

A telephone net is in theory completely understandable. It's built from the ground up, every component is described at some point, it's deliberately engineered by humans, it's all totally understandable, right?

Wrong. We don't even understand the telelphone net of the greater northeast USA area. A fair while back, that area had a huge telephone outage owing to the introduction of a new electronics component, suffering from a software bug that became apparent under special circumstances....

So you want to model the human brain? So you think about how to simulate it? Been listening to Ray Kurzweil lately? Hang on, you're in for a rocky ride, because there are big, big problems in trying to do that. This is just a very quick blog post to give some reading material on various aspects of neurophilosophy. Since that's such a horribly complex area, then I add here some books thrown in in a random way on all sorts of tangential but important aspects. Anyone knowledgeable in this area will...

These are just some photos of a passerby ladybird I found one day in my garden, from 03 October 2011. The labybug in question as far as I can tell is a 16-Spot Orange Ladybird, Halyzia 16-guttata, also known as Halyzia sedecimguttata, and as Coccinella 16-guttata. Don't blame me for the confusing multitude of names. Because I try not to interfere or damage suchlike insects and animals at all, the photos aren't all that crash-hot, but hey, they will do. Copyright is asserted; feel free to hot-link,...

The book of how not to do PR is long and funny. I discussed the mini-debate between Dawkins and Fraser in my last blog post; the latest examples of how not to do PR come from Dawkins and Jim West, in reactions well after the interview this morning. Richard Dawkins has complained to Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent for the British newspaper The Times, that he "was ambushed". From the Times:

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So as everyone knows by now, there was a short debate between Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) and Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) today on BBC Radio 4. You can hear it in full here, and I will embed the almost-seven-minutes'-long clip at the bottom of this post. The debate is about a poll conducted, on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason And Science (RDFRS), by Ipsos MORI, one of the largest marketing-research companies. You can read part 1 of the poll results here, and part 2 here....

I'm in a fairly moss-gathering mood as usual, and I thought I would do all of you a Valentine's card, and this is it. Gandalf in Lord Of The Rings describes Tom Bombadil as a moss-gatherer, and I'm a fair bit that way myself. In my recent post I said I didn't often do special days, but hey, some things are worth noting, yes? Since I feel like it, I'll return to my synaesthesia roots for this post, and mix music-videos, text and photos throughout this post. So be patient and look past the videos...

On Sunday, yesterday, I made an outing to the Rhine, roughly 40 Km away from where I live in Germany. I took some photos of ice-bound water-meadows; these meadows function as safety-valves for the Rhine along its length, to slow it down and to absorb seasonal flooding. It's very icy at the moment in Germany.

Photos below, maybe some more later.


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Happy Darwin Day! Today, the 12th of February, is Darwin Day. I don't usually do memorial days, but the day for Darwin and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day are both days which really deserve remembrance, since both sum up essential aspects of the human condition and goals. Mind you, there's still a bit left over - one wonders if there is an Emma Goldman day, or a Rosa Luxemburg Day, to really balance up everything one should be remembering. Today, @dustshoveller, UK Parliamentarian archivist and historian,...

Today, two national newspapers in Britain carry large front-page headlines about a war against Christianity in Britain. You can see the photographs of the print versions either here below, or in this link courtesy of @mjrobbins. The Daily Mail, a tabloid of low worth, carries the story headlined "Christianity under attack: Anger as major court rulings go against British worshipper", while Ruth Gledhill (Religion reporter) scores front-page cred with a report on the front page of the far more reputable...

Does TIME magazine think that Americans are idiots? There's a fair bit of argybargy going on over the net at the moment, a fuss which has actually been here before and now repeated: the relative covers of TIME magazine.

TIME publishes its magazine with four different covers, one for the USA market, one for Europe, one for Asia and one for the South Pacific. Now, if you look down below at the first picture, under the social media footer, you will see what the fuss is all about. The...