Dilip Simeon's blog

Although Saudi Arabia is already the genre leader in the  public crucifixion space , they may well want to expand their serial output, perhaps bringing the same characters back for floggings every week, or finding a way to vertically integrate their beheading content.  Though my tears have yet to liquefy at news that Amazon’s boss,  Jeff Bezos , was phone-hacked, there’s a certain dramatic irony to the idea of an accidental circular firing squad among the tech gods. In Norse mythology, a lot of the deities end up doing for each other, so there is vague precedent to Apple’s iPhone or whatever being Bezos’s achilles heel. It’s like an Elon Musk rocket containing the Google boss exploding on the launch pad, or Mark Zuckerberg getting brained by an Amazon drone. Of course, what elevates the story of how Bezos’s underpanted selfies may have made their way into the public domain is the identity of the hacker, which the  Guardian this week  suggested was probabl...

A confrontation between the Polish government and senior judges has escalated drama-tically, prompting an anguished response in Brussels, after the country’s supreme court and parliament issued conflicting rulings on the legality of judicial reforms.  T he rival rulings, which concern attempts by the governing Law and Justice party (PiS) to assume direct control over the judiciary, have thrown the country’s legal order into chaos, with judges now liable for prosecution for complying with rulings issued by their own supreme court. PiS, a rightwing populist party, has spent more than four years trying to take control of the country’s system of courts and public prosecution, eroding the independence of most branches of the judicial system. “This is an extreme escalation by the Polish government,” said Marcin Matczak, a professor of law at the University of Warsaw. “It has run out of arguments so it is resorting to brute force.” After taking office in 2015, PiS assumed direc...

While written from a Christian perspective, the book is not evangelizing, and it has something to teach us all. At its heart, it is a moral critique of capitalism The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity Eugene McCarraher Reviewed by JAMES G. CHAPPEL In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. The banal premise is that some needs are prior to others. We need food and shelter, for instance, before we can seek friendship and love. And only once we’ve attained those can we attain the summit of the pyramid: the Shangri-La of “self-actualization,” defined as doing what one “is fitted for” and becoming “more and more what one is.” This vision of human flourishing has become ubiquitous in the decades since Maslow’s paper. A regular feature of school curricula and self-help guides, it has filtered into our everyday understanding of the meaningful life: one in which a stable material and social infra...

There are two problems with anger: it is morally corrupting, and it is completely correct Suppose that you are angry on Tuesday because I stole from you on Monday. Suppose that on Wednesday I return what I stole; I compensate you for any disadvantage occasioned by your not having had it for two days; I offer additional gifts to show my good will; I apologize for my theft as a moment of weakness; and, finally, I promise never to do it again. Suppose, in addition, that you believe my apology is sincere and that I will keep my promise. Could it be rational for you to be just as angry on Thursday as you were on Tuesday? Moreover, could it be rational for you to conceive of a plan to steal from me in turn? And what if you don’t stop at one theft: could it be rational for you to go on to steal from me again, and again, and again?  Though initial anger might be reasonable, we tend to view unending disproportionate revenge as paradigmatically irrational. Though your initial anger at...

Extensive water channels built by indigenous Australians thousands of years ago to trap and harvest eels for food have been revealed after wildfires burned away thick vegetation  in the state of Victoria .  The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, consisting of channels, weirs and dams built from volcanic rocks, is one of the world's most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems, according to  UNESCO .  Constructed by the Gunditjmara people more than 6,600 years ago, it is  older than Egypt's pyramids .  While the aquatic system was known to archaeologists - it was added to  UNESCO's World Heritage List  last July -- additional sections were revealed by the fires that have ripped through the state in December. Gunditjmara representative Denis Rose, project manager at non-profit group Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, told CNN that the system was significantly bigger than what was previously recorded. "When we returned...

The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end. It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times its original size through a process called “cosmological inflation”. Next came “the graceful exit”, when inflation stopped. The universe carried on expanding and cooling, but at a fraction of the initial rate. For the next 380,000 years, the Universe wa so dense that not even light could move through it – the cosmos was an opaque, superhot plasma of scattered particles. When things finally cooled enough for the first hydrogen atoms to form, the Universe swiftly became transparent. Radiation burst out in every direction, and the Universe was on its way to becoming the lumpy entity we see today, with vast swaths of empty space punctuated by clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies...

The Cardiff University team discovered a method of killing prostate, breast, lung and other cancers in lab tests.  The findings, published in Nature Immunology , have not been tested in patients, but the researchers say they have "enormous potential" Experts said that although the work was still at an early stage, it was very exciting.  Our immune system is our body's natural defence against infection, but it also attacks cancerous cells.  The scientists were looking for "unconventional" and previously undiscovered ways the immune system naturally attacks tumours.  What they found was a T-cell inside people's blood. This is an immune cell that can scan the body to assess whether there is a threat that needs to be eliminated.  The difference is this one could attack a wide range of cancers. "There's a chance here to treat every patient," researcher Prof Andrew Sewell told the BBC. He added: "Previously nobody believed this could ...