notes

                    Holbein's Erasmus   When I was in my teens and my parents had finally relented and stopped insisting I went to Sunday School and I was starting to question things, we had a school history lesson when the humanists were mentioned. The only name I remember from that lesson was Erasmus - probably because he sounded more like he should have lived in ancient Rome than 15th century Holland. I had very little understanding then of what humanism was about but I was getting sceptical about bible stories and God etc.  It was another year or two before a stand-in teacher gave us the best RE (religious education) lesson we had in five years at grammar school - on Buddhism or Islam or maybe Hindu, when all I had ever known was Christianity. The idea of humanism as it distilled in my mind seemed like an attractive alternative to mainstream religion. My take on humanism was like taking the best bits of Moses an...

  Blurred Boundaries The internet is mainly cats, right? So here are our cats. Except they're not our cats. Shadow, the one on the table, belongs to our neighbour two doors down. Sox (our name) is the new guy in the neighbourhood. Pronouns not yet determined so lets assume its him/his. He's been around for a week or two but we don't know where he came from. More about Sox and Shadow later.   You don't have to be an expert to recognise who painted these: Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko. Both are abstract art and neither represents anything. They just are. But they are very different and very recognisable. Mondrians use primary colours and rectangular shapes. Rothko's tend to have more subtle colour differentiation and less regular, though still typically rectangular shapes. The most significant difference though is probably how boundaries are handled. Mondrian is a 'hard edge' artist with flat colour fields with sharp boundaries. He often further defines bounda...

Someone must know how watches came to be called watches. I don't. I don't even know how clocks got their name. But I do think the word 'watch' would make more sense if it applied to what we call glasses or spectacles - we could call them watchers. I have previously written in praise of Nothing's budget CMF smart watch and ear buds, and if I needed a new smartphone it would be a Nothing CMF. But will I need a new smartphone or will I be able to make do with the watch and glasses I normally wear? Smart watches have touch screens, Bluetooth and WiFi. Some can even take phone calls and come close to smartphones in what they can do. Meta/RayBan glasses have cameras, microphones, speakers and Bluetooth, and can understand speech. Meta, Google, Apple, Samsung and others are getting close to offering smart glasses with all this and, crucially, displays. We interact with our phones by gestures - swiping and tapping the touchscreen and by pecking at virtual keyboard or, incre...