Dinner Party

Margaret Atwood - Birds

2010-01-26T17:15:00.004Z

It's been _ages_ since anyone posted here, but I read this article in the guardian last week and thought it was really good, and worth sharing.

It's by Margaret Atwood, who is one of my favourite authors of all time. She writes in a very detailed, descriptive manner, with all types of topics. Some of her books would be called science fiction, but that would be a narrow category to put her in in my opinion. We are currently reading a book by her about debt (appropriate in the current financial climate!), called Payback. It's great to read something that is quite a serious issue, but in a manner that is highly entertaining and easy to read - with loads of examples from all through history of our relationship to debt. The same is done in this article about the plight of birds. At the heart of it, it's a pro-bird-protection article, which I am fully in support of, but it's also an interesting read.

Brilliant speech

2008-10-09T21:53:00.002+01:00

I read an awesome speech in the newspaper a couple of weekends ago, and I've attached a link to it here. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. Any thoughts?

great photos!!

2008-08-06T04:21:00.003+01:00

Hi Angus and Selina,
Loved reading your updated blog and viewing your fantastic photos. You have indeed been very busy over the past few months! The photos were stunning and beautiful, made me really feel like I was there with you! You are a talented photographer Selina and continuing to improve to the stage where I believe you could certainly sell many of your photos, in particular the panoramic shots. I look forward to seeing more! I am inspired to start making more of an effort with my photos, as well as to go out to more places that are photo-worthy!

Keep having fun (and sipping that whiskey on top of mountains like true Scottish folk)!

Sarah
xo

work/life balance

2008-05-21T01:24:00.004+01:00

No one has written on here for a little while. I wondered if it is because we are all quite busy with work. I find it interesting how much time we put into work. Sure, money is a great lure and it helps if you like your job. Just, with getting up before the sun rises and getting home after it has set I wonder sometimes if this is what I want for myself.

I received an email from a friend recently to update on where things are at with her. She sounds like she is very successful, travelling around Europe for her managerial/advisory job 4 days per week, staying in an apartment in Paris 1 day per week to work, and then returning to her home to Brussels for the weekend. I was quite envious, as it sounds so glamourous, and the money she must be earning is probably far more than I could ever get as a Psychologist. However, I thought more about it and she has a dog and a boyfriend, and I wonder how that goes. I'm still jealous though.

I personally feel a lot of pressure to "get" stuff. Like a house, a better car, a better couch. Whatever. It's that "oh, that would be nice" feeling. I see some of my friends buying investment properties while I'm still renting and it's not a good feeling. Yet I don't really want to work 12 hours a day like those friends do, as I probably would never get to see my lovely house and couch and would mostly only drive my spiffy new car to and from work.

It's a hard thing though, balancing it out. What do others think?

"Cool" sucks

2008-03-08T11:29:00.003Z

I'm gonna make one of Angus' grand, sweeping generalisations here. Cool, and being cool, is a load of bollocks (yes, I know I sound like an old man). The sooner we-as-a-society move away from it, the better off we'll be.

I reckon one of the first cool people was James Dean. Back then, the idea of being cool was to be a rebel, and not to care what other people thought. Unfortunately, it now means following the latest fads, and often being cruel and manipulative and (ironically) constantly thinking about what other people think about you.

I think cool has been corrupted by advertisers to make us greedy, avaricious and selfish - basically they want to sell us crap. I've decided that I'd much rather be free than cool. What're your thoughts?

By the way, I've written a song about this - you can listen to it here (it's the 4th song), or go to my jamendo page (for lyrics, etc):

Congrats on your new job Angus!

2008-02-22T13:28:00.003Z

Angus, that is great news about your new job! Sounds exciting! You'll have to keep us updated on your blog how it goes :) Congrats also on finishing your thesis!

Book Review: "Shantaram"

2008-02-22T13:09:00.002Z

Has anyone else read this book? I really enjoyed it. It is a novel based on the life of its author, a guy called Gregory David Roberts, who escaped from a Melbourne jail, went to NZ, and then flew to India and made a life for himself in Bombay. He is a pretty smart guy and I think pretty charismatic, and he has had an amazing life filled with regrets and his attempts at redemption. In India, he firstly lived in a slum working as a "slum doctor" using his basic first aid training to (try) to treat rat bites, cholera, etc. He then goes through a lot of other crap which I wont go into as it would give the plot away. The main character, Lin, is based on the author. It is a really interesting as well as engaging read I found.

Other than the interesting story itself, the other thing that pulled me in with this book is some of the great characters, especially Prabaker the awesome tour guide who meets Lin when he first gets to Bombay. I laughed and cried my head off with this book and I've even joined an online forum (www.shantaram-forum.com) to chat about it more as it moved me quite a bit.

Some people may not like this novel as it is a thick, long book with a few rambling bits and a few (only a few) cheesy bits during a love scene and in relation to Lin's love interest. But overall I would recommend this book. It is going to be made into a movie I think, which may be a good or bad thing, with Johnny Depp playing Lin as far as I know.

Book Review: 'We need to talk about Kevin'

2008-02-15T16:30:00.005Z

I recently read the novel entitled 'We need to talk about Kevin', by Lionel Shriver. It was a very easy book to read, and I thought it brought up a lot of really really interesting issues, such as bringing up children, relationships and also the question of whether people are born 'evil' or if society shapes them. It's written by Kevin's mother, who spends most of the book questioning if her behaviour and the way she brought up her son is the reason that he massacres a dozen classmates & teachers when he's about 16 years old. It's a really interesting thought - was he born that way, or did his childhood influence him to the point where he could commit such a horrendous crime. It's hard to believe that anyone could do such a thing, but it's fairly often that you hear in the news of another event similar to this occuring somewhere in the world. So what is the point at which a child turns from a normal child into a killer? Do they really understand what they are doing? Also in this book the mother says that the child never really bonded with her, no matter what she did - does this imply that the child was already locked into a certain mindset? How strong is the nature vs nurtre and how much could this really affect someone?

Summary: A good, easy book to read with some interesting issues in it. It made me think about the consequences of having children beyond the normal ones that I would have thought about before reading it. It did make me cry at one point though ;-)

*** Worth a read.

More: This wiki article doesn't totally give the plot away, but you might not want to read this site unless you've already read the book or don't plan on reading it.

reply: The world economy

2008-01-31T10:56:00.000Z

I'm really interested in what's happening in the world at the moment economically - the contrast between the booming economy in Australia and slowing economies in the UK and USA. Why is there such a difference? Australia is booming mainly because of the very strong minerals boom, and partly because of the oil prices, but how is this affecting the average person - surely only those people actually earning money in this sector are becoming much wealthier - they would spread some wealth through the community by buying bigger houses/cars/shopping more/eating out etc etc, but is this enough to spread the wealth around to everyone else? As far as I can see, why people keep spending doesn't make sense to me - food prices are rising because of the double whammy of higher oil prices and the drought, and everyone's mortgages are going up with the increasing interest rates, yet people keep spending! That's in Australia. Here, where there is also a lot of oil that is pumping lots of money into the community (particularly in Aberdeen!) (and today Shell announced their profit for the year which was some amazing number and makes them the most profitable company in UK history), but I think the UK is more closely ecomonically linked to the US where it seems almost certain that there will be a recession. This means that house prices (that have gone up massively in the last 5 years or so here) are stagnating a bit here in the UK. Also, the banks here have decreased interest rates again, which is the opposite of what's happening in Oz - here there are sales all the time in the shops to try to get people to spend! I think people here are scared of what's going to happen because of the US, but I'm not really sure. Also, recently a large bank collapsed (Northern Rock) and that has got a lot of people scared - the government bailed it out I think, but I don't know details. Also interesting is to see the effect of the stock market downturn the last few weeks - it was pretty severe over here too, and I don't think it's recovered as rapidly as the oz market did last week.

So those are my thoughts Jesse, on what's going on - basically I have no idea, but find it pretty interesting nonetheless! I'd be interested in hearing other peoples' views, so please either comment or join up as an author and blog away ;-)

Cheers,
Selina

The world Economy

2008-01-31T09:15:00.000Z

Jesse posted the following as a comment, but I thought it was worthy of a thread of its own. Selina has given Jesse a login to the blog - if you want one, just ask!
------

So, what's the ideal conversation to go with some home made haggis?

Being without haggis here I can't really answer that question but I figured someone's got to get the ball rolling on this dinner conversation. As boring as it may sound I'd like to chat about the world economy. Many suggest that America is currently in recession and house prices are falling in parts of the US and the UK. It certainly doesn't seem to have had any impact in Adelaide although I've heard parts of Sydney are feeling the crunch. I am interested to hear what impact, if any, is being felt in Edinburgh.

Regards
Jesse

Book: The passion of the Western Mind

2008-01-31T09:08:00.000Z

I read a great book recently. It's called "The passion of the Western mind," by Richard Tarnas. I haven't studied philosophy much at all - the sum total of my prior education being reading "Sophie's World" a few years ago. I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in this kind of thing - it was very easy to read.

The book starts with the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), and basically goes to the present (it was written in 1991). The thing that totally amazed me when reading about the Greek philosophers, was just how bloody smart they were. (I'm sure this will sound stupid to people familiar with it), but they were bloody geniuses. Except, they were really, REALLY, ignorant. They knew nothing about the world or themselves (or damned close to it), and had to work out everything from scratch. And that's exactly what they did - they systematically tried to reason out the various whats hows and whys that surrounded them. In the space of several generations they'd invented mathematics and science - roughly as we know it today. I still can't believe they pulled it off (even to the point of thinking crazy thoughts like aliens must've taught them).

Anyway, one of the first things that the book says, is that the history of knowledge has been a process of discarding old ideas and replacing them with new ones. Tarnas puts it really well: "unless we are able to perceive and articulate, on their own terms and without condesencion, certain powerful beliefs that we no longer consider valid or defensible..." ie. Believing that the world is flat and at the centre of the universe seems ridiculous to us today, but there were good reasons for believing it.
Firstly, people believed that the Gods (this was pre-Christian) created humanity and the earth, and that the universe revolved around it. Heard of the Music of the Spheres? That was the sound that the planets, sun and stars made as they revolved around the Earth - each in successively further spheres.
The change from believing that the Earth was the centre to believing that the sun was the centre was huge, and didn't happen until Copernicus and Gallelio in the 16th century. Gallelio was placed under house arrest for life, for not recanting his public beliefs that the sun (not the Earth) was at the centre of the universe. But eventually (with the help of telescopes) the evidence was incontrevertable, and opinion slowly changed. It took a long time though - just look at the theory of evolution, there are people who still (in the face of similarly conclusive evidence) stick to the old belief in Genesis.
The point of this is to show that we, now, have beliefs about the world that are totally and fundamentally wrong. Beliefs that in the future will be discredited. I can imagine someone in 200 years saying "I can't believe that people used to think that..." If only we could know what they were!

The whole course of the history of knowledge has been that of moving our perception of ourselves away from the centre of the universe and to a greater understanding of the relativity of all things. ie:
Socrates/Plato/Aristotle: The Earth is flat, people are the centre of the universe
Copernicus/Galeillo: Actually, the sun is the centre of the universe, not the earth.
Charles Darwin: Hmm, people weren't made specifically by God, we have arisen from other animals in a natural process.
Sigmund Freud: The human subconscious is run by animal instincts (evolutionary history) that we cannot know or control, that govern our behavior in fundamental ways. We are not rational creatures.
Hume: We have sense perception of the world, but it is totally distorted by our mind. Although we can make sense of the world as we see it, that's not the real world - we can never know or understand the real world. This even cut up fundamental concepts like causality, labeling it as an assumption because of the way our mind models the world.
Kant: similar to Hume, but more optimistic. Yes, science only explains the world in our mind, but it does so well. Also, Kant realised that the world we see is actually _created_ by our minds, and the way we interpret our senses.
Albert Einstein: Everything is relative to the observer - not just our perception, but the actual physical universe - including space and time.

What I found particularly cool, was what Tarnas described as "the dual legacy" to the Western mind from the Greeks. He says that there is a tension between the idealist (romantic) and the rational (scientific). Tarnas thinks that the changes in our beliefs about our place in the universe (rationality) has meant that we no longer believe there is a "reason for it all" (idealist) which is why we have some of the social problems that we do. He also underlines some of the limitations of the cult of science (science can tell us the hows but not the whys) and he believes we have become too rationalistic and should bring back more of the romantic.

Tarnas finishes with an awesome (and very moving) paragraph, which I'll quote here:

"Our moment in history is indeed a pregnant one. As a civilization and as a species we have come to a moment of truth, with the future of the human spirit, and the future of the planet hanging in the balance. If ever boldness, depth, and clarity of vision were called for, from many, it is now. Yet perhaps it is this very necessity that could summon forth from us the courage and imagination we now require. Let us give the last words of this unfinished epic to Nietzshe's Zarathustra: ...and how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and ... a way to new dawns."

Article: Cityphilia

2008-01-16T10:09:00.000Z

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/lanc01_.html

Super interesting article in the London Review of Books about money, the latest credit crunch, share derviatives & options, and life in London. Worth a read.

You are invited to an (online) dinner party!

2008-01-16T07:47:00.000Z

So, this is our brainchild. A blog site that any of our friends (that's you guys reading this) can add to. The idea is that we would like to discuss life, the universe and everything with you all (just as if we were at a dinner party!), but it's a bit harder being on the other side of the world (we invite you and you just don't come!). So this is the place.

Have you got something to share? All you need is a gmail account and then ask us to add you to the list - then blog away. Have you read a good book, seen a great movie, have a favourite new song or photo, experienced some excellent art, culture, music, theatre etc? Share your thoughts and ideas here! We'll get the ball rolling with a few blogs of our own, but then we'd like you all to join in!!