The Imaginary Pet

Here is what may well be the nerdiest pet peeve you ever hear of. I don't like the mathematical but imaginary number i. Even the fact that I have to press ctrl+i, i and then go through Word’s autocorrect features and undo the automatic capitalisation irritates me. But the thing that really irritates me is that it’s…

The Reality in Your Head

In my earlier post (A Spiritual Atheist) I said something that may seem a little contradictory to my normal "truth is" mentality. In fact, what I said sounds outright like ontological relativism. I said there is a universe in your head and that it is as vast as the universe we normally refer to (the…

A Spiritual Atheist

I meditate. I don’t know why I have taken forever to let you all know that; I think I was waiting until I could be sure certain people had gotten bored with my blog and stopped reading. But I do practice meditation. I’m not trying to contact any higher power or commune with God (although…

Atheists, Easter, Family and another mention for a smallest sibling

I, in total, have 6 younger siblings. In the following story I am going to talk about the same sibling I talked about here. In part I want to tell you what I, as an atheist, say to my younger and impressionable family members with regard to the sensitive issue of religion. And this story…

England-based Hilarity (Sharing a post from a friend)

England, one of the big homes of the Enlightenment, and the birth place of Stephen Hawking, Newton, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Malthus, is full of idiots. I lament the idiocy of my home country. Did you know, for example, that a school in Essex is banning triangle shaped flapjacks because they are…

Blogging out of Sexual Tension

Someone did some research quite recently that showed that female research professors published new research papers at an ever-slower rate as they aged, whereas male research professors published new research at the same rate up until an age, where it suddenly trailed off almost completely. This pattern follows the same pattern as each gender experiences…

The Value of What you Have

Never under-estimate the value of the things you have. I want to share two stories with you just to show the power of one of the most valuable things around: friendship. As I’ve mentioned many times (because I’m a boastful pain in the rump) I went to Thailand. And I had a good time. Not…

7 Trading Eisenstadt for Vienna

Last Thursday my students performed a show that we’ve been working on for two weeks. It was a big show, and the parents seemed to enjoy it—which is the point. I then got a present off of the school: a big a bottle of wine and a school t-shirt. So far things have gone as…

6 From Bratislava to Eisenstadt by Luck and Tooth-Skin

Bratislava had struck us as a depressive looking place, but we made sure we had a damned good time nonetheless. And we succeeded with ease. Bratislava is fun! And as the night fell it came properly to life: the lights gave the entire city a charm and a beauty that the day time hadn’t afforded…

5 Being in Bratislava

The week did, as weeks tend to do, go on. I taught reported speech “He said she said” so that my students can gossip about each other in English. But, much more appropriately, I taught them how a court case works in English: a judge, a jury, a lawyer and a verdict. That may be…