Mind & body.

Mr Gervais's new comedy is not very funny. But it made me uncomfortable only because I am not sure it is proper to let Ricky Gervais pull my chain. Read more...

The British Computer Society asked me to be one of two responders at a debate dinner featuring Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (7 November 2011). The question was: will it be possible for someone to be a full citizen without digital access? Read more...

Edward Burra is far more impressive in the flesh than in reproduction. Waldemar Januszczak got almost everything about him right, I think, in the Sunday Times, and I add only this ... Read more...

I had four great days in and around the Hanseatic League city, Visby, and its island of Gotland. As the new Gudrun Sjödén catalogue says: the island is a symphony of greys. Visby, though, is vivid, and brilliantly coloured. It has plenty of Farrow and Ball chic, but also bags of winter-defying gaudiness. (All in the best possible taste, of course.) Here's a brief guide... Read more...

I've been invited to the Greenbelt religious festival (27/08/11) to debate " The Poor are Poor because the Rich are Rich?" It is arranged round a Methodist document, Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom. Read more...

There are 10 mini-essays on this site which intend to do honour to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the extraordinary people who are associated with it. See the "Browse by tag" menu at left. Here's a v short YouTube video of an RDN visit to the surviving Chernobyl plant in 2005. You may be interested in Chernobyl's cancer death toll, and an account of that appears here. If you're kindly interested in my personal take on Chernobyl, read on below..... Read more...

What happened on 26 April 1986 Read more...

The reactors at Chernobyl were RBMKs, which moderate their fission processes with graphite and are cooled by water. Hence their common Western name: LWGR, or light-water graphite reactor... Read more...

In some sense all errors are human. Reactor 4's design made it fallible, but Soviet secrecy made it impossible for its designers to explain the weaknesses of their work. Soviet bureaucracy also made it likely that the reactor might not be well built and maintained... Read more...