Life by a thousand cuts

What an opportunity these days to cure ourselves of the confirmation bias! Sharing the same views with someone else can be a source of comfort.  Too much of it leads to mummification. Naturally, it feels good to be part of a group, it's in our genes. No one would deny that. Apart from families, there is some strong solidarity manifesting itself among people belonging to the same generation or football club.  Does it matter they can have more men than women, or the other way round?  Same as families,  any socially formed  groups are not less of a club or association if one type of chromosome combination is represented in greater numbers.  Or not? On the internet, new types of communities spring up all the time. Gamers, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, real and fake gurus, you name it. Choice is enormous. Do men and women gravitate towards one genre or another? Podcast, video, blog? Lecture or dialogue?  It's hard to say, still early days, but there is one distinct advantage in the n

CROWDSOURCING THE VIRUS QUESTION The Virus does not deserve a photo. Just words, mainly arranged in questions. As signing up for an online course in virus genetic sequencing is not a priority right now, let's first stick to popular science.  Even better, to what every possible outlet has written about its appearance: spherical, with leech-like tentacles.  No idea how the crown analogy came about. I looked long and hard to find any connection or identify the spiky crown that gave it its name. That blob we all now recognise is full of spikes, true, but that's about it. Anyway, it has a name which is not necessarily its important feature, IMHO. The package is far far more important.  It is made of fat, "an envelope", as it's called. Have all similar viruses a layer of fat?  Apparently yes, but why fat and not something else? Is it because fat is such a good preservative (think of meat kept for months in lard) ? Is it then a survival techn

The title of this blog post, it sounds a bit like marketing advice, doesn’t it?  It’s got nothing to do with marketing. If there was a form to fill, something along the line of “conflict of interests or disclosure”, it would contain a bold-faced and in capital letters 'NO'. Nothing to sell or flog, no book or method or suggestions. Just amazement at an ever-increasing number of people who have lived to tell the story of extricating themselves from some form of personal hell or making it in the bigger hostile world. Maybe finding the Holy Grail of human interactions. Before the internet, the number of people who had garnered enough authority to dispense recommendations was pretty limited. Dale Carnegie comes to mind, as a random name. John Grey is another one, of a more recent past. Nowadays, the vast marketplace called social media is full of new authors and there is a surge of passion to help 'the other ones" help themselves. It would not take a very pow

It's not all doom and gloom, after all. Or is it? Kids no longer play by themselves in the streets of most western cities, lovers spend time copious amounts of time looking at their phone instead of gazing at each other adoringly, emoticons and gifs have replaced emotional exchanges of words. Families and friends, united by devices. So what? Digital natives have not been left with a huge void in their lives and the non-digital generation should not fear their offspring is going to grow into some mutated half-VR creature. If anything, there is currently too much choice, a sure source of neurosis. Shall I do this or shall I do that? Go on Twitter or Reddit? Post something on Facebook or Instagram? Actually the latter dilemma has been solved, as you can post on both at the same time. It is true that parenting is now much harder than it used to be 30 years ago, when the framework of daily life was pretty fixed. There was no escape from the physical confines, so any venturing ou

Linguists, not in your sweetest dreams has such a golden opportunity come your way.  Owners of PhD in social sciences, rejoice. This is your time, so if you want to advance your research, stop procrastinating. If you have not done it already, sign up to as many social media platforms as possible and watch the world go by.  Up to now, if you wanted you investigate how people truly communicate when they are angry or upset, you'd have had to carry out an experiment, recruit volunteers, set-up the environment and then pray that they act genuinely. Otherwise, it's been listening to individual stories and trying to identify a version closer to truth. Trading insults between four walls has always been part of domestic life. Insults directed towards strangers, out in the open world, have been around for ages too, and at times there were some consequences.  Remember the Three Musketeers' famous duels?  Generally, the human mouth is not always emitting nice and pleasing s