In the latest issue (January 2008) of BBC Focus magazine (science for the intelligent 10-year-old) there’s a mini-interview with one of the few females on TV who really do make my heart beat faster: Dr Alice Roberts, “clinical anatomist, archaeologist, TV presenter and author”, also a very talented artist and a qualified medic. Those of you in the UK who’ve watched either Time Team (Channel 4), Coast (BBC2) or Don’t Die Young (BBC2) will know Alice Roberts as the slightly off-the-wall girlie with the dyed red hair. The interview includes:
What’s the greatest threat to humanity? Humanity.
Who would you clone? I wouldn’t. Sexual reproduction is much more exciting.
What would your epitaph say? Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni. And I’d be buried in a chariot just to fool future archaeologists.
Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before. The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: in the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.
Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.
[Ian McEwan; Sunday New York Times Magazine; 02 December 2007]
I was watching the soccer results programme on TV this afternoon. Some player (I didn’t hear who) had obviously had a bad day; this was described by one of the studio pundits as:
There’s an interview with SF author Arthur C Clarke in the current edition of BBC Focus magazine, which contains the following …
What’s the greatest threat humanity faces? Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation. It’s spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all. I hope our race can one day outgrow this primitive notion.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans and seldom respectable. No virtuous man – that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense – has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
Two excellent quotes today from the Quotation of the Day; both perpetrated by President George W Bush:
You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time. Phone conversation with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf; 7 November 2007; reported by CBC
The power of the executive branch is vested in the President, who also serves as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. White House document explaining the role of the President of the United States
It does make one wonder how good these peoples’ grip is on reality.
Eccentric looks at life through the thoughts of a retired working thinker
