Kind Brains

My brain has been very foggy recently and I have not been thinking clearly enough to post here. Here, however is an interesting link to an article and  short video describing how the human brain is wired for kindness, compassion, empathy. Forgive the cheesy cartoon image.

“Jesuit Day” Chez Renaissance Mathematicus

  Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus, posts about the role of Jesuit scientists in the early modern period. Since this blog started I have attempted to draw my readers attention to those contributions by profiling individual Jesuits and their contributions and also on occasions defending them against their largely ignorant critics. I have decided to …

Faceless

Google Street View tries to protect the privacy of the people it photographs by automatically detecting the presence of the human face and suitably pixellating it. Making an interesting theological statement, Google doesn’t distinguish between the human and the divine: Marion Balac has a page full of faceless gods.

The Autonomic Nervous System and ME

Two recent posts at Health Rising, ‘Biomarker…‘ and ‘System Reset…‘, explore the role of the autonomic nervous system in ME. The research they describe definitely resonates with my own experience. I can get stuck in a state of ANS arousal that nothing seems to shift once it is in place–which is just as described. One …

The Galileo Affair: Rough Guides continue

The Renaissance Mathematicus continues his series of Rough Guides on the transition to heliocentricity, this time focusing more directly on the confrontation between Galileo and the Church. I have been criticised for claiming, in a recent post, that given time the Catholic Church would have come to accept heliocentricity in the seventeenth-century and in fact …