Time wakes you up in the morning. Time puts you to bed at night. Time whips you while you work, telling you that you must do it faster, must get it done sooner. While you sip a cup of hot chocolate, time blows the cream off the top and tells you to hurry up, there are things to be done! When you are satisfied with your life, and are perhaps gently stroking a cat, time tells you that it will all end you when you least expect it, so don’t get too relaxed.

As nearly as I can tell from my time as a biologist at the British Museum of Natural History*, humans are the only creature afflicted by time. Certainly all animals move through time, but only humans know it.

Continue reading →

It’s fair to say that political parties hate their opposite. Liberals think conservatives are mean and stupid. Conservatives think liberals are spineless and stupid. Both sides can’t be right, and in fact I think both sides are wrong.

Politics are broken in some way. You only need to have the misfortune to wander into the comments section of any politics-related website to see what I mean. I have read comments suggesting that President Obama is an agent of Al-Qaeda, and that he is a homosexual and his wife is actually a transgender man. When it was President Bush, there were equally as many comments from the other side suggesting such things as him having been personally responsible for 9/11 and that he only had a grade school education. People from one side will excuse “their” guy from something they were crucifying the other guy for in the previous election.

On any one article you can scroll for pages and pages, with each side shouting their message at the other, and nothing happening except each side becoming more firmly convinced they are right and that the other side are wrong, and in addition are idiots.

It breaks my heart to see this happening. How can two people truly work for the good of their country if they fundamentally disagree on what that good is, and on top of that think the other person is actively working against their country? Continue reading →