The Stairway to Heaven – Part 2 – Guerrilla Politics
There can be no more iconic image of romantic derring-do than that of swash-buckling British cavalry soldiers in bright red tunics and all their gold braided finery charging on horse-back, swords drawn, towards the Russian cannons that opposed them during the charge of the Light Brigade. Yet romantic and heroic though the charge of the Light Brigade was, the British cavalry were so depleted in numbers by the withering hail of enemy fire that by…
National Life – From the Standpoint of Science
This is a slightly abridged transcript of a lecture delivered in Newcastle on 19th November, 1900, to the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society by Karl Pearson, F.R.S., Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College, London. Karl Pearson was a polymath, born in Islington in 1857, he studied Mathematics at Cambridge University, later Physics at the University of Heidelberg, and at various other seats of learning; he studied metaphysics, physiology, Roman Law, 16th Century German Literature, English Law and Socialism and became…
Elysium
By Heordredenn: Film Review: Elysium, written, directed and co-produced by Neill Blomkamp, released August 2013. It is 2154. The Earth is an overpopulated, impoverished, environmentally degraded ruin, with civilization falling apart. But high above a vast, silver-white wheel structure hangs in the sky, the last island of peace, order and civilization, the great orbital habitat Elysium, now home to the global elite of the cosmopolitan super-rich. That is the premise of South African director Neill…
Sparta – or a cautionary tale.
By Frederick Dixon: As the traveller in southern Greece descends from the uplands of Arcadia into the country of Laconia – the far south-eastern corner of the Greek mainland – he encounters a scene of extraordinary beauty. There, before him in the sun, lies a broad and smiling valley whose pastures and fields lie among vineyards and olive groves, citrus and almond orchards. This is the valley of the slow, green, River Eurotas, a valley…