history
A reflection on our molecular origins
Saturday, July 18th, 2009 | cosmology, history | No Comments
[IN AUGUST 2008, I was asked to give a talk on climate change in the Rhodes University History Department. This, the department that turned my world view upside down, over a decade ago. Some say science shows us we don't need god. I'd say history did that for me. I grew up believing that god was the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, that human beings were just a small blip on the longer timeline of god. Then I studied history, and discovered that the human timeline was a lot longer than Sunday School lead me to believe… suddenly I realised that god was just a small blip on the much longer and more impressive timeline that is the history of this universe.
Some people figure this out right from the start. I’m a late starter, I’ll admit to that. But at least I get there in the end. So this, a little reflection on why history matters, and why science and history and natural history are inseparable disciplines. An extract from my own little gospel of rational thought.]
Dusting off yesterday (M&G)
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column, history | No Comments
When you’re a youngster, music has a way of becoming communal. Well, it did when I was a teenager, which is why it didn’t matter that I never owned a tape deck in the Eighties. I had my roving box of tapes and there was always someone with a boom box.
Some of those cassettes were R6,99 blanks picked up at the local stationer, recycled through the shifting music du jour that backlights the changing seasons of capricious adolescence. Their white labels carried wiggly, hand-written artist names: Simon & Garfunkel or Magna Carta, scratched into the Tippex painted over a previous album name; gloomy Depeche Mode jettisoned Alice Cooper; Pink Floyd, the perennial favourite. › Continue reading
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