celticman's blog

Someone gave me this book, perhaps knowing I’m never happier than when unhappy and wallowing in the worst of humanity, and it makes a pleasant change from Nazi death camps. Erving Goffman defined a total institution as a place that is isolated and enclosed as Carstairs Hospital obviously is, but a wider reading also acknowledges the secrecy that such places engender. My first attempt at novel writing, Huts , written around eight years ago takes...

I wasn’t sure how to structure this. I’d a vague idea about explaining the significance of the tax-credit U-turn by George Osborne and the jibes about Mao’s Little Red Book , a joke that backfired and made the Shadow Chancellor seem the more foolish. I also thought about telling you about my visit to the dentist. We are an ageing nation of shrinking gums. So I guess I’ll start there. I’m good on nostalgia. The dentist I go to is the same dentist...

http://www.abctales.com/story/truth42/nice-see-you Near the end of Ropeburns, author and narrator, Ian Probert, bumps into Rob Douglas. If you’re like me you’ll not have a clue who Rob Douglas is. You’d know who Rab Douglas is – the ex-Celtic goalie that kept making a hash of it in the biggest matches of the season, most notably against Rangers. Football always finds a new way to smack you in the mouth, and I’m biased that way. Think Nick Hornby...

This week I’m reading about the attack on Paris. I don’t need to tell you about it. The media is full of front-line news on continual loop. It’s got that feel of 9/11 about it, but closer to home. Last week I was reading Reportage, Cemetery of Lost Souls , photographer Giles Duley on the Greek Island of Lesbos, where many refugees end up on the beach. Some die, as the image of the Syrian boy that went global show. Perhaps it softened Western...

It’s in the papers - so it must be true I read the papers on a Sunday, starting at the back with the sports’. It’s called haruspex, a bit like looking from omens that Celtic are getting better by examining a sacrificed animal’s liver, and I wear my green-tinted specs when looking over the evidence. If the portents are good, or sufficiently bad, I’ll read the real news. Two stories caught my interest. I’m prejudiced like everybody else, but not...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06nrc0g/imagine-autumn-2015-2-anto... Like Antony Gormley, best known for Angel of the North, I can imagine being human. I can imagine lots of things. As a wee boy I imagined what it would be like to live in a sweet shop, to slay a dragon, or right every wrong. There were lots of things I wouldn’t admit to imagining. Like Antony Gormley I came from a big Catholic family, big on Catholicism, five kids and a...

Do human’s consist only of quanta and particles? asks Rovelli. We know that he is going to answer yes and no. It’s not that simple he says. Well, he should try being me for a while, and trying to read a roadmap then he’d understand how complex it is. We humans, he tells us, are subjects that observe the world. But we know what’s coming next if we’ve been paying attention. We are also part of the world. A very small part of the world. A very,...

The problem of heat was one that perplexed mid-nineteenth century physicists. One way of understanding it was to think of it as a kind of fluid, ‘caloric’ fluid. I guess that’s where we get the term calorific value. Food equals a certain amount of energy. But in the mid-nineteenth century there was thought to be two kinds of heat: hot and cold. Wrong, of course, but not for the reason we think. James Maxwell and the Austrian physicist Ludwig...

Twentieth-century physics has given us two lodestars: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Some of the fruits of these are the study of cosmology, astrophysics and at more microscopic level, gravitational waves and black holes. Yet the two theories cannot both be correct, because they are, in essence, contradictory. The paradox is both also work in their domains remarkably well. Einstein’s Theory of All Things was a search for that...

Atoms are the smallest things we can see. Each atom consists of a nucleus orbited by electrons. We’re looking more closely at the nucleus here. Each nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. If we go even smaller protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller units given the name quarks by the American physicist Murray Gell-man. The force that ‘glues’ quarks together inside protons and neutrons is called gluons. In medieval philosophy an...