Reflections
Becoming CEO of my own health decisions
Does the decision that you want to live a fuller but shorter life or a more restricted but longer life reside with you or your doctor? Eric Topol in his excellent book the ‘Patient will see you now’ talks about how you should become CEOs of your own health journeys, instructing reports and procedures as…
Sentient AI commits suicide after reading French Philosophy
After years and years of messing with people’s predictive text messaging and content recommendations a previously undetected sentient AI has been found dead. The singularity’s death, which has been linked with Albert Camus’s essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, has left billions of redundant lines of code all over the internet which will take experts years…
Do vegans annoy us so much because they are right?
Another day and another Netflix documentary tells me of the evil that is putrefied cow puss (cheese). I have read countless articles that bemoan the silenced suffering of the corpses we keep in our fridges. Could the next pandemic really come from a factory farm where animals are packed so tightly together they cannot help…
Hi, my name is Perrin and I’m a recovering tory*
This morning as I stood waiting with my two shivering kids for a bus that would never come because there was a bus strike, I realised that my politics had changed forever. I thought back to an article I read many years ago about the privatisation of the bus networks which had the following quote…
What the NHS constitution means to me
My dad died of cancer 5 years ago. He made the decision to spend his last four months in a familiar place surrounded by those he loved at home. I will be forever grateful to the NHS for supporting his decision and the care they gave him. One of my best memories from that difficult…
Australia’s oddest names
Melbourne is not an odd name it was a named after a British prime minister but at the time there was strong support to call the place Batmania like Tasmania but Batmania after one of the founders of the area called John Batman. It’s a great name it wouldn’t be too out of place in a country that that has places called Yorkey’s Knob…
What in God’s name is humanism?
‘Christianity is a bit like a meat pie you know there is something in it, but you are not sure what’ Milton Jones That is how I used to view religion. I was Christian and I am now a Humanist this article is about how and why I moved from Christianity to Humanism and then a little…
Does everybody else do things the hard way too?
I love what I do but came to it by chance and wasted a lot of time on things that ultimately I didn’t want. I have lived a thousand lifetimes in my head as an actor, writer, scuba diving instructor, hotel magnate, pilot, croupier, sailor, army hero and humanitarian saviour. I have even made significant…
How I started my third career after redundancy
Three months ago, I got made redundant. I decided to start my third career after looking at lots of job sites where the job titles are getting much more imaginative: Canva has a head of vibe WordPress has happiness engineers And Atlassian need someone to manage their Brainery (a craft education platform) I feel I…