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Yesterday I wrote about the impact that Philip Pullman made at the Convention on Modern Liberty. You can now see a video of his speech.

They seem to be uploading videos of the different sessions; I'll post when they link to videos of speeches to which I have referred.

When I posted about CoML, I had wanted to include an excerpt from David Davis' closing speech, but it wasn't available on the CoML website.

They have now put it up. You can read the whole speech if you wish.

I am posting the excerpt here rather than editing my previous post so it doesn't get lost.In fact I would like to respond to Jack Straw, ( Read more... )

I have been trying to write about the Convention On Modern Liberty, which I went to a couple of weeks ago in London. I started off trying to write about each session, but I got bogged down - it was a very full programme - so I am going to try a different tack, and just write down my thoughts of the whole event ( Read more... )

I saw Steven Pinker recently, lecturing on language; it was tied into the publication of “The Stuff of Thought”, which was also the name of the talk. Pinker is a psychologist who has written about linguistics, the brain, and evolutionary psychology. It was his reputation that attracted me to the talk ( Read more... )

The second lecture I went to the Science Festival was entitled “Are You Wrong About Your Rights?” There were three speakers talking about citizens’ rights and remedies; it was very interesting; but I still don’t know what it was doing in the Science Festival, since there was not really any science in it at all ( Read more... )

It was a birthday a couple of weeks ago, and the guys I work with gave me a card: one of those 3-d cards where the picture changes as you tip the card. This one showed a beer glass, and as I changed the angle, it started full, then half full, then empty. (I am a glass-half-full kind of a bloke.) I was saying thank you, and I described the beer ( Read more... )

I came across this on Donald Clark's blog (there a couple of interesting things on pledging allegiance to the Queen, and how managers fail to develop...).

TED talks is a very interesting resource - a series of lectures, recorded and published on the web. Kind of like intellectual YouTube. In this talk, neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor describes ( Read more... )

I went to a lecture this week, which I fully intend to write about later; it was a fascinating account of an organisation in crisis.

The thing is, at the end of the talk and before questions were taken, the chairman - he was professor of investment or something - said "of course, this lecture takes place under Chatham House rulesHe hadn't said ( Read more... )

One of the other things Mark Fletcher said in his talk was that the more you link to people, the more they link back - and hence you can build your audience, because people trawling through those blogs will pick up on you (as long as what you say is pertinent and inteliigent - natch ( Read more... )