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Jack’s Blog

  • Malaria, swine flu and those cunning Chinese

    I watched a fascinating programme at lunchtime today and it brought back to me the perennial debate in research between inductive and hypothetico deductive approaches to scientific discovery. Having exhausted most of a book on the topic, it is not in my mind to go over that ground here except by being as cryptic as… Know More

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  • Zen flesh, Zen bones, pork and the sun

    Having left behind the extraordinary silent harmony of nature and nurture (see photograph) around the Buddhist temples of Kyoto and Hiroshima, I am back in Ghana where the chaos of the roads, electric sounds and utilities prevails, as always. If you asked me how I’d like to spend my last few hours of this life,… Know More

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  • Watchmen

    I was born before Graphic Novels achieved their genre status as adult literature. But their precursors, Horror Comics, had their heyday when I was pre-teens and used to go up the village to have my hair cut at the part time barber’s. He sold everything that was unacceptable which gave him a certain consistency in… Know More

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  • Border Crossings

    The flight from Accra to Osaka, via Dubai, leaves a triptych of images of their Customs. Until I started writing this I had never thought about the metaphoric ambiguity of the terminology. When we enter a country we expect to meet different cultural norms and there, at the border, this expectation is flagged up in… Know More

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  • Home Alone: end-games

    I am still being pursued by researchers from TV programmes who want to explore how computer gaming undermines society as we know it! Years ago, in the mid-90s The British Library awarded me a grant to direct a research project on video games in the home. Unlike the highly suspect statistical research of the time,… Know More

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  • The Sins of the Father: Fritzl

    Josef Fritzl is an extreme deviant. How does a society deal with such individuals? There are always a handful of aberrant people who commit such appalling acts that they shock and bewilder even the most experienced psychologist of human nature. I spent an evening once with the then UK Government’s top psychiatrist, someone whose life… Know More

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  • Eating people is wrong

    Except if you are in the Andes and have survived a plane crash and there is nothing to chew on except your newly dead fellow passengers. Whatever it is that makes us develop taboos, it cannot be the Divine. If that were so, then there would be some semblance of conformity among the world religions… Know More

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  • Slumdog Millionaire – Piss and Tell

    I like Danny Boyle as a director, from Trainspotting on. He handles colour and crowd movement brilliantly. He also has a gift for managing the sordid so that it hurts and yet there is no overly glossy dramatising that you get in most American gangster films, for example. And he shocks in ways that audiences… Know More

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  • Dying for it

    It is a prevailing feature of these blogs. Ruminations on the nature of death. Obviously I have a personal interest, growing more so as the end of my candle burns a now disproportionate path and, judging by a growing readership, so do you, whatever condition your own tallow is in! Maybe it’s life imitating art,… Know More

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