Simply The Best Carrot Cake Recipe
As a special gift to you all on the first day of 2013, my wonderful, creative, and talented wife, Fatma, has allowed me to share her famous carrot cake recipe. […]
Surviving Neonatal Care – The 65-day Journey Home from BWH NICU.
Having been asked by staff at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to write a short account of our experiences there, following the birth of our twins, this is […]
Why debate gun control when the evidence speaks for itself?
Whether yesterday’s tragedy could have been avoided with tighter gun controls will once again be hotly debated. For those of us watching from the other side of the pond, it’s […]
Sentience, Morality and Veganism
Following my post last week, questioning the consciousness of newborns, I exchanged a number of tweets with a professor of developmental psychology, who made the interesting observation that, The points you […]
Neonatal Consciousness – What is it like (if anything) to be a newborn baby?
Five weeks after the nail-biting experience of having our twins born two months early, my wife and I have now settled into a routine of regular visits to the neonatal […]
The slow climb to babyhood – First reflections on the premature birth of our twins.
On Wednesday October 17th2012, at 10:14am, a tiny baby boy weighing just 1.05Kg was lifted from my wife’s womb through an emergency Caesarian section. One minute later, following a slight […]
What if money was no object?
Today on Facebook, an old school friend shared the above video, in which the late British philosopher, Alan Watts, in a gentle, fatherly and wonderfully mellifluous tone, makes a strong case for pursuing whatever activity […]
Science Fiction Plausibility & The Donnie Darko Effect
My eldest daughter and I recently rented the film Source Code, a fast-paced time-slip / alternative-reality action thriller in which an US army pilot, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, awakens on a […]
Why do we like Music? – Part 2 – Answer: Fractals?
In part 1 of this essay, we looked briefly at the history of music and at possible explanations for its universal appeal. Today, I want to discuss three recent pieces of […]
Why do we like music? – Part 1
Music seems to have a been a part of human culture since the beginning of culture itself. Earlier this year, researchers excavating caves in southern Germany found ancient flutes carved […]