Mind & body.

I am interested in the idea and practice of spirituality: but it may all be nonsense, and I may be venially corporeal. This category is a bit of a catch-all for posts on subjects ranging from the intellectual (I should be so lucky), to the spiritual (likewise) via the psychological and the creative.

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#5 Who’s to blame

It is surprisingly hard to allocate blame for the Chernobyl accident. Within the soviet system, nuclear power stations could only have been designed by an ambitious and secretive scientific elite working with an ambitious and secretive technological elite to deliver the national ambitions they all shared and which were guided by a political elite who had complete power to advance a person to giddy heights, or consign them to outer darkness. Read more...

Published

22 January 2011

#6 The politics of Chernobyl

To a surprising degree, it suited many parties - governments, journalists, and campaigners - to exaggerate the consequences of Chernobyl, and then to blame them on the Soviet regime. Read more...

Published

22 January 2011

#7 The official international response

From the start, Western governments were keen to accept the Soviet account of the causes and consequences of the accident, and to agree that the Soviets had done their best in the face of it. Blame was not politic. Read more...

Published

22 January 2011

#10 BBC Horizon: radiation risk and Chernobyl

This was a note written by Paul Seaman (www.paulseaman.com) as a July 2006  account by the BBC's leading science programme of the different ways of thinking about and accounting for the death-doll from cancer caused by radiation. It helps show why different experts come to very different predictions of the scale of, for instance, the Chernobyl disaster. Trouble is (for those who'd like a simple life) it debunks "LNT" which is the underpinning theory of the low estimates of people like the Chernobyl Forum, and does so by arguing that these are way too high. Read more...

Published

02 December 2010

Andrew Marr bans dodgy facial hair

Andrew Marr seems so obviously nice and clever that it seems odd to find some of what he says very irritating. Last Sunday, for instance, he announced on his BBC1 Sunday show that he thought that there ought to be a crackdown on dodgy facial hair.... Where would would this end? Read more...

Published

14 September 2010

Rational Optimist: RDN’s still one

It's not often a good ploy to whinge, and this isn't exactly a moan. Well, only a bit of one. I want to stand up for my Life On a Modern Planet (1995) and Rich Is Beautiful (2005) as works of "rational optimism". Read more...

Published

20 June 2010

I Am Love: Flawed masterpiece

For long stretches of I Am Love, I was bowled over in much the way I imagine the movie-makers intended. It had risible patches which didn't quite shake the wheels off the wagon. Read more...

Published

28 April 2010
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