Piece on cardiac surgery in Times Literary Supplement
Originally posted on A Medical Education:
In the current TLS I have a review of two books on cardiac surgery. One is Stephen Westaby’s memoir of his career, the other is Thomas…
Category: complexity
“our work, though perhaps smart, was by no means wise”
The geodesic dome was the brainchild of Buckminster Fuller, a polymath perhaps noted best for the number of his ideas than the successful execution of any of them. Geodesic domes are…
When technology doesn’t take: Update on #EdoBlocks and #Flic
A while back, I blogged enthusiastically about Edo blocks. These are Lego-ish blocks made of cardboard. At the time, they had proved great fun to make. They seemed to be a…
Maren Meinhardt on an urban tree
From the TLS, June 2nd: Outside my window, there is a tree. Even without it, the view is not at all unpleasant: a row of Victorian houses, cars, a skew-whiff…
‘Storms call in question the assumption that the ‘normal’ state of a tree is upright.’ – from ‘Woodlands’, Oliver Rackham
Twenty years ago people thought hurricanes occurred in other continents and killed trees. Learned writers treated ‘storm mortality’ as subtracting old trees from wildwood. Few remembered the ‘Great Storm’ of…
“A culture is no better than its woods” – W H Auden, “Bucolics”
(Edit 22nd August 2018 – welcome if you have come here by Googling “a culture is no better than its woods”, you may also be interested in this post about…
Elegy of Fortinbras, Zbigniew Herbert
Years ago, I read Zbigniew Herbert’s wonderful “Elegy of Fortinbras.” I studied “Hamlet” for the Leaving Cert. Brendan McWilliams somewhere wrote that he had a pet theory that the Shakespearean…
Leandro Herrero: “An enlightened top leadership is sometimes a fantastic alibi for a non-enlightened management to do whatever they want”
Originally posted on A Medical Education:
From Leandro Herrero’s website, a “Daily Thought” which I am going to take the liberty of quoting in full: Nothing is more rewarding than having…
Séamus Sweeney 